The FCC would be fine if it did only regulate pricing along a publicly funed infrastructure but they don't, when they gain enough regulatory control over simply one medium in one region the use it as an excuse to have a blanket coverage and censorship of all sectors remotely related to it.
To put this another way in theory they could eventually fine people for objectionable contect on the internet if it is distributed by cable or phone lines. I am not saying they will, but given the logic of their existence it is perfectly possible as is any sort of tax congress should decide to put on the use of physical lines.
A congressman is a constinuency's lottery ticket to see if they can strike it big and get their trivial or social crap made law. Ammending the constitution is a bitch and two-thirds so passing blatently illegal legislation that no one will ever call them on because it'll never involve anything that they can be brought to court for is matter of habit. The president could call them on it, but given that the two branches have developed some kind of fucked up complacency over the last century people are going to be basically bowned until they stop electing morally-certain but ethically void people.
By that I mean plenty of music groups online now sell songs 1.99 or thereabouts without itunes. Radiohead made a legitimate gamble that if they put their stuff up for "whatever you want" they would get purchases from people who don't necessarily like their music, but like the statement their action makes, however with proven outlets like itunes there is no reason to suspect that such a system wouldn't be profitable or viable if not in the same stupifyingly successful way record sales used to be.
The primary problem is the level of money people want for what they do and what people want to spend at any given time. I don't have any of this guys music because it really is all terrible, and if his group didn't do the makeup and had all of their fantastical performances then he would never have gotten the money to be an asshole to begin with. Were it not for free radio music letting people hear Kiss no one would have showed up anyway. Oh, also, do you know what musicians did before the recording industry? I don't but I can count on one hand the bands I know before the 50s.
So a half century, tops, of the music industry, and now bands and music will die because people want MUSIC and not an experience that involves waiting for crap, in a crap format that leads them to a crap performance. Oh yes, lets sue the college kids for copying music! However when a rock star gets caught doing every kind of illegal drug known to pharmacology lets check him in to a five start hotel so he can get sober long enough for milking part of his career where people by his shit because they hope it as good as his one time hit.
The economy sucks right now in the states, people are not overly happy, and while this normally can be a boon to the entertainment industry, it really depends on what they are selling and how they are selling it. Just like Japan's population decline might not be a bad thing because it is possible that many people should live on one island, it might not be a bad thing for musicians to get paid something reasonable so they save it and down blow it all before the end of their careers. Have you ever seen a VH1 special about poison? I don't know any of their songs but the whole cast of characters strikes me as the most angsty group of old codgers I have ever seen with an entitlement boner. Some of their sentiments could be taken as death threats towards kurt cobain, and it is a pitty no one is giving them shit for it.
This morally questionable entity that would most likely NEVER do the thing I'm proposing because of a very long history of not doing thing I am proposing, should not be trusted. We should instead trust a group comprised of people who will most likely do exactly the thing I fear whenever they feel they are criticized. I am not shit crazy and I approve this message.
Because a representative form of anything can never be abused and will certainly not be twisted into a political circle jerk regardless of what needs to be practically done to ensure function.
Everywhere today there is big.gov and frankly it is a little disingenuous to imply that traffic going through the US as opposed to China, Russia, even the UK and Germany isn't subject to monitoring. The US only stands out because at one point in time we had something on the books that said this is a bad thing.
No but seriously you are wonderfully depressed and that is fine. You've got this idea that America was a great worldwide empire, like Britain or Rome. Not so much. Frankly if any of the scholars in the declining years of Athens or Rome were to read what you just wrote and understand it in all of it's context, you would be beaten by a man in a robe.
What exactly do you think is going to happen in America, based on recent events, that is WORSE than anything else in the country's history. Do you fail at reading about things before you were born?
"The dollar is going down! Shitshitshitshit! I can't buy cheap electronics from Asia anymore! My European candies and home appliances! MY IKEA STORE!" Because the Great Depression, Oil Embargo, civil rights struggle, COLD FUCKING WAR, and all of that shit, oh, well that was nothing but a challenge. We keep a retard in the white house for 8 years and float a congress of Ben Dovers and suddenly the ties that bind are sundered and people will take to the streets to tear down the foundations of government and society. You my friend need to drink more, because the only thing that is really going to fuck us up is people eating their own paranoid shit. Newsflash, people on the street think Bush is an ass and the war is Vietnam II, but they aren't exactly making FALLOUT shelters.
When Britain, Rome, and all of those wonderful empires ate it, they lost colonies, kingdoms, huge resources that they had poorly managed for their own benefit. Unless you believe that illegal immigrants are going to turn barbarian invader, and let me tell you that makes a ton of sense for people who send home pay in cashy american dollars, you are gagging on your own crap.
First of all the PDF functionality is non-existent despite the claims. However the.doc.txt translation is fan freakin tastic. Pictures are pretty crisp and the major bugs with it were patched. I imagine sony has some evil rootkit what have you on my computer, but quite honestly the program hasn't done anything I can think of as invasive, and other than being a little slow it's ok.
Right now I have a slight gripe with the browsing ability on the reader itself when there are lots of books or documents on it. The ability to magnify documents and books is also really nice and it is really easy on the eyes. This is definitely still first gen hardware, so you can wait for better, but honestly this thing keeps me sane on train travel, airplanes, etc. I often just copy whole online articles, paste them in word, and then browse at my leisure on the go.
Reply in a manner that would, if it came from someone who lost family or a limb defending their rights, make one feel a might guilty.
"I don't live there haha, shame on you for not devoting your life to the advance of your society at the expense of your personal life!" thinking is really getting annoying as hell. Not in the sense of the "Oh I really am apathetic," but more of the "bet his country has a WONDERFUL track record," nails-on-chalkboard hipocracy. Please, lecture the fine fundamentalist friendly americans of Slashdot more on what they should do. Letter writing? Voting? Personal consumer democracy? PACs? Lobbyists? Here's an idea, old people vote a lot, so lets use our second ammendment rights take up arms and kill off all the grayhairs so everyone else has to vote!
Bet you have a copy of V for Vendetta sitting in your dvd player tray right now and your idea of fixing democracy involves at least one person whose name is "neo".
That up until recently (given the last decade of Macs) the little bastards were weighed down by terrible processors. Not terrible in quality, just terrible in updating compared to intel and AMD chips. Looking at pure specs, if you buy a mac with a video card it won't be half bad for running anything that has been out for 6 months or a year.
I think developers basically forgot about Macs because it did take about three years for the G series of procs to catch up to pentiums. That's insane and also, the structure was different.
What he is saying is valid. The original complaint has nothing to do with interoperability with linux either, so don't reflexively join a wankfest because you have perceived one where there is none.
Honestly, while I think publishers piss their money away with firms like the existence of this warms my heart if only because it creates a scenario reserved for RPGs. I mean fucking lawful evil vs. chaotic neutral.
Also, Sup com, I pre-ordered this time. It was my gf that pirated it to see if the full version ran on her old laptop (barely) and then bought it with her new laptop because she loved it. Congrats publishers, not only did this company fail at "defending" your media, their failure actually worked to your benefit.
Think about the "Loss Prevention" guy. He's getting paid to do a job that companies think is a "deterrence" but is actually a "better-source-of-tuition-money-than-getting shot-in-Iraq".
But hey sure, not a constitutional requirement to do something that not only doesn't harm you but doesn't judge you (I mean everyone gets stopped by the guy at Fry's, and honestly, on busy sales weekends they've got like ten guys at the doors just putting marks straight through receipts), but it's training everyone to gas their neighbors and rat on the "undesirables" when the uber-state comes forth from the future. I'll believe that when I believe they actually have the manpower time or energy to just monitor a percent of the US population with any degree of competency. Fucks sake our prisons don't have that kind of security, not to mention the fact that people really DO pirate music which (and I'm quite sure of this) is stealing and is illegal, but our nation is so fantastically awesome that most can get away with it while a few get to be public heroes against an overzealous and inept super-villain.
Here, you want to show some balls, some serious tallywacker tenaciousness? Stop tipping in the US. No I don't care if jackoff mcgee the ever smilin bartender/waiter signed for a wage that makes the conspicuously accented gardener next door have the relative salary of a non-outsourced computer programmer. It's custom, and despite the places that put it on the receipt it's not obligatory.
This isn't "authority GONE MAD" it's "business custom". You go to a high-end electronics store, or a place that lets you buy so much shit you need a vehicle that gets no more than 4 mpg to fit all of it into, and you're expected to do this ritual at the door because it makes them feel happier about not having to trust everyone who goes in their store. That may seem like an insult, but TRUST is a massive burden that we don't really like to pay for. You wouldn't be shopping for shit made largely out of the country if you had to trust the people who made it anyway, you just don't think about it when you're getting those wonderful deals. The supermarket, the wal-mart, the circuit cities, if you had even a shallow understanding of the governments and human/civil rights standards in the countries you patron you'd be caught with your dick in you're own mouth talking about this little inane distraction.
"My civil rights were RAPED from me as the doorman looked at my receipt, opened my bag (filled with wonderful gadgety devices from places that get people to live on money I'd literally use to buy soft soft lotion infused toilet paper to wipe my ass with), and then marked my receipt in carnal glory with a highlighter."
Oh, and yes, please, call the fucking police on 911, have them show up, and then proceed to be uncooperative. That's how I like to resolve shit. Fuck, I mean what kind of tittywinker would call up the police, perhaps with stolen property, accuse someone of trying to stop them with said stolen property, give a false name, and drive off with the booty and the satisfaction of the store owner getting a citation IF said tittywinker could get away with it? Who I ask you WHO?! Oh wait, half the damn populace because that would be clever, and honesty be damned, we really like clever.
Furthermore, and just to complete the list of shit you guys are guilty of, the constitutionality of this circle jerk is irrelevant to all of your idealism anyway, because I know for a fact everyone of you fuckers would be sipping bootlegged liquor if it were banned while jacking off to banned porn and listening to banned music while playing banned games with a banned book in both hands and ducked taped to both testicles. Look at it on it's face and if it were not UN-constitutional to do so, would you or would you not SHIT a litter of kittens for having to show the receipt at the door that is less than 10 meters from where you received the receipt? If it was COMPLETELY AND EXPRESSLY WRITTEN in the constitution, that you HAD T
We should also universally agree that George Lucas should be drawn and quartered for creating the prequels, perhaps castrayed. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, so we're stuck with a pile of steaming shit. You can see how this relates.
Really if the West united in some Tolkienesque alliance of good feelings, I'd be all for it. However that's like picking teams at recess; the good kids almost always end up on one team, and while the other kids might play, they're going to be permanently pissed off.
I'm waiting for the next transportation revolution that can get my ass to Germany for the beer, Japan for lunch, and back to Italy for the coffee in all of 5 hours. In the interim I expect to be able to post to poe-news, and play WoW. Chop-chop people.
I think the British Claimed the U.S. and India less than 500 years ago... So claiming shit gives jurisdiction? I mean holy hell, we paid Mexico (a pitance) for California, maybe we should get a rebate now that it's populated by the collective genius that elected the govenator.
According to the Tibetans (and demographics proably agree with them) China moved in about 1949, colonized, and said the Ming Dynasty had originally conquered the territory therefore the communist forces had a right to it based on the likeness Chairman Mao bore to a cloud in the sky the day they decided that was good enough reason to take over the territory without international uproar. If that sounds like confusing made up bullshit, then understanding has been conveyed.
Taiwan is not it's own country because Nixon was intelligent enough to know that he could say that with a straight face and no one would know he was full of shit in his lifetime. While the amount of shit he was filled with was speculated on, it probably hasn't been until recently that scientists have determined he was full of it. Don't get me wrong, I'd trade a thousand Clintons, and 5000 Shrubbery for one Tricky Dick, but that doesn't mean people today should not get what he was doing.
China's environmental agency is staffed by about 300 people. They have sixteen of the worlds most polluting cities, and while nuclear power would be cleaner and nicer, coal usage is expected to double by 2030. The perks of signing as a developing nation perhaps?
It isn't that the U.S. is inefficient in it's polluting, it just happens to produce far more energy than any other nation. That's little comfort to California citizens who shell out tons of money to avoid brownouts, but I imagine everyone else there appreciates the power.
Slashdot Mirror
The FCC would be fine if it did only regulate pricing along a publicly funed infrastructure but they don't, when they gain enough regulatory control over simply one medium in one region the use it as an excuse to have a blanket coverage and censorship of all sectors remotely related to it. To put this another way in theory they could eventually fine people for objectionable contect on the internet if it is distributed by cable or phone lines. I am not saying they will, but given the logic of their existence it is perfectly possible as is any sort of tax congress should decide to put on the use of physical lines.
A congressman is a constinuency's lottery ticket to see if they can strike it big and get their trivial or social crap made law. Ammending the constitution is a bitch and two-thirds so passing blatently illegal legislation that no one will ever call them on because it'll never involve anything that they can be brought to court for is matter of habit. The president could call them on it, but given that the two branches have developed some kind of fucked up complacency over the last century people are going to be basically bowned until they stop electing morally-certain but ethically void people.
By that I mean plenty of music groups online now sell songs 1.99 or thereabouts without itunes. Radiohead made a legitimate gamble that if they put their stuff up for "whatever you want" they would get purchases from people who don't necessarily like their music, but like the statement their action makes, however with proven outlets like itunes there is no reason to suspect that such a system wouldn't be profitable or viable if not in the same stupifyingly successful way record sales used to be.
The primary problem is the level of money people want for what they do and what people want to spend at any given time. I don't have any of this guys music because it really is all terrible, and if his group didn't do the makeup and had all of their fantastical performances then he would never have gotten the money to be an asshole to begin with. Were it not for free radio music letting people hear Kiss no one would have showed up anyway. Oh, also, do you know what musicians did before the recording industry? I don't but I can count on one hand the bands I know before the 50s.
So a half century, tops, of the music industry, and now bands and music will die because people want MUSIC and not an experience that involves waiting for crap, in a crap format that leads them to a crap performance. Oh yes, lets sue the college kids for copying music! However when a rock star gets caught doing every kind of illegal drug known to pharmacology lets check him in to a five start hotel so he can get sober long enough for milking part of his career where people by his shit because they hope it as good as his one time hit.
The economy sucks right now in the states, people are not overly happy, and while this normally can be a boon to the entertainment industry, it really depends on what they are selling and how they are selling it. Just like Japan's population decline might not be a bad thing because it is possible that many people should live on one island, it might not be a bad thing for musicians to get paid something reasonable so they save it and down blow it all before the end of their careers. Have you ever seen a VH1 special about poison? I don't know any of their songs but the whole cast of characters strikes me as the most angsty group of old codgers I have ever seen with an entitlement boner. Some of their sentiments could be taken as death threats towards kurt cobain, and it is a pitty no one is giving them shit for it.
This morally questionable entity that would most likely NEVER do the thing I'm proposing because of a very long history of not doing thing I am proposing, should not be trusted. We should instead trust a group comprised of people who will most likely do exactly the thing I fear whenever they feel they are criticized. I am not shit crazy and I approve this message.
Because a representative form of anything can never be abused and will certainly not be twisted into a political circle jerk regardless of what needs to be practically done to ensure function.
Everywhere today there is big.gov and frankly it is a little disingenuous to imply that traffic going through the US as opposed to China, Russia, even the UK and Germany isn't subject to monitoring. The US only stands out because at one point in time we had something on the books that said this is a bad thing.
No but seriously you are wonderfully depressed and that is fine. You've got this idea that America was a great worldwide empire, like Britain or Rome. Not so much. Frankly if any of the scholars in the declining years of Athens or Rome were to read what you just wrote and understand it in all of it's context, you would be beaten by a man in a robe.
What exactly do you think is going to happen in America, based on recent events, that is WORSE than anything else in the country's history. Do you fail at reading about things before you were born? "The dollar is going down! Shitshitshitshit! I can't buy cheap electronics from Asia anymore! My European candies and home appliances! MY IKEA STORE!" Because the Great Depression, Oil Embargo, civil rights struggle, COLD FUCKING WAR, and all of that shit, oh, well that was nothing but a challenge. We keep a retard in the white house for 8 years and float a congress of Ben Dovers and suddenly the ties that bind are sundered and people will take to the streets to tear down the foundations of government and society. You my friend need to drink more, because the only thing that is really going to fuck us up is people eating their own paranoid shit. Newsflash, people on the street think Bush is an ass and the war is Vietnam II, but they aren't exactly making FALLOUT shelters.
When Britain, Rome, and all of those wonderful empires ate it, they lost colonies, kingdoms, huge resources that they had poorly managed for their own benefit. Unless you believe that illegal immigrants are going to turn barbarian invader, and let me tell you that makes a ton of sense for people who send home pay in cashy american dollars, you are gagging on your own crap.
First of all the PDF functionality is non-existent despite the claims. However the .doc .txt translation is fan freakin tastic. Pictures are pretty crisp and the major bugs with it were patched. I imagine sony has some evil rootkit what have you on my computer, but quite honestly the program hasn't done anything I can think of as invasive, and other than being a little slow it's ok.
Right now I have a slight gripe with the browsing ability on the reader itself when there are lots of books or documents on it. The ability to magnify documents and books is also really nice and it is really easy on the eyes. This is definitely still first gen hardware, so you can wait for better, but honestly this thing keeps me sane on train travel, airplanes, etc. I often just copy whole online articles, paste them in word, and then browse at my leisure on the go.
Reply in a manner that would, if it came from someone who lost family or a limb defending their rights, make one feel a might guilty. "I don't live there haha, shame on you for not devoting your life to the advance of your society at the expense of your personal life!" thinking is really getting annoying as hell. Not in the sense of the "Oh I really am apathetic," but more of the "bet his country has a WONDERFUL track record," nails-on-chalkboard hipocracy. Please, lecture the fine fundamentalist friendly americans of Slashdot more on what they should do. Letter writing? Voting? Personal consumer democracy? PACs? Lobbyists? Here's an idea, old people vote a lot, so lets use our second ammendment rights take up arms and kill off all the grayhairs so everyone else has to vote! Bet you have a copy of V for Vendetta sitting in your dvd player tray right now and your idea of fixing democracy involves at least one person whose name is "neo".
That up until recently (given the last decade of Macs) the little bastards were weighed down by terrible processors. Not terrible in quality, just terrible in updating compared to intel and AMD chips. Looking at pure specs, if you buy a mac with a video card it won't be half bad for running anything that has been out for 6 months or a year.
I think developers basically forgot about Macs because it did take about three years for the G series of procs to catch up to pentiums. That's insane and also, the structure was different.
What he is saying is valid. The original complaint has nothing to do with interoperability with linux either, so don't reflexively join a wankfest because you have perceived one where there is none.
Honestly, while I think publishers piss their money away with firms like the existence of this warms my heart if only because it creates a scenario reserved for RPGs. I mean fucking lawful evil vs. chaotic neutral. Also, Sup com, I pre-ordered this time. It was my gf that pirated it to see if the full version ran on her old laptop (barely) and then bought it with her new laptop because she loved it. Congrats publishers, not only did this company fail at "defending" your media, their failure actually worked to your benefit.
Think about the "Loss Prevention" guy. He's getting paid to do a job that companies think is a "deterrence" but is actually a "better-source-of-tuition-money-than-getting shot-in-Iraq".
But hey sure, not a constitutional requirement to do something that not only doesn't harm you but doesn't judge you (I mean everyone gets stopped by the guy at Fry's, and honestly, on busy sales weekends they've got like ten guys at the doors just putting marks straight through receipts), but it's training everyone to gas their neighbors and rat on the "undesirables" when the uber-state comes forth from the future. I'll believe that when I believe they actually have the manpower time or energy to just monitor a percent of the US population with any degree of competency. Fucks sake our prisons don't have that kind of security, not to mention the fact that people really DO pirate music which (and I'm quite sure of this) is stealing and is illegal, but our nation is so fantastically awesome that most can get away with it while a few get to be public heroes against an overzealous and inept super-villain.
Here, you want to show some balls, some serious tallywacker tenaciousness? Stop tipping in the US. No I don't care if jackoff mcgee the ever smilin bartender/waiter signed for a wage that makes the conspicuously accented gardener next door have the relative salary of a non-outsourced computer programmer. It's custom, and despite the places that put it on the receipt it's not obligatory.
This isn't "authority GONE MAD" it's "business custom". You go to a high-end electronics store, or a place that lets you buy so much shit you need a vehicle that gets no more than 4 mpg to fit all of it into, and you're expected to do this ritual at the door because it makes them feel happier about not having to trust everyone who goes in their store. That may seem like an insult, but TRUST is a massive burden that we don't really like to pay for. You wouldn't be shopping for shit made largely out of the country if you had to trust the people who made it anyway, you just don't think about it when you're getting those wonderful deals. The supermarket, the wal-mart, the circuit cities, if you had even a shallow understanding of the governments and human/civil rights standards in the countries you patron you'd be caught with your dick in you're own mouth talking about this little inane distraction.
"My civil rights were RAPED from me as the doorman looked at my receipt, opened my bag (filled with wonderful gadgety devices from places that get people to live on money I'd literally use to buy soft soft lotion infused toilet paper to wipe my ass with), and then marked my receipt in carnal glory with a highlighter."
Oh, and yes, please, call the fucking police on 911, have them show up, and then proceed to be uncooperative. That's how I like to resolve shit. Fuck, I mean what kind of tittywinker would call up the police, perhaps with stolen property, accuse someone of trying to stop them with said stolen property, give a false name, and drive off with the booty and the satisfaction of the store owner getting a citation IF said tittywinker could get away with it? Who I ask you WHO?! Oh wait, half the damn populace because that would be clever, and honesty be damned, we really like clever.
Furthermore, and just to complete the list of shit you guys are guilty of, the constitutionality of this circle jerk is irrelevant to all of your idealism anyway, because I know for a fact everyone of you fuckers would be sipping bootlegged liquor if it were banned while jacking off to banned porn and listening to banned music while playing banned games with a banned book in both hands and ducked taped to both testicles. Look at it on it's face and if it were not UN-constitutional to do so, would you or would you not SHIT a litter of kittens for having to show the receipt at the door that is less than 10 meters from where you received the receipt? If it was COMPLETELY AND EXPRESSLY WRITTEN in the constitution, that you HAD T
We should also universally agree that George Lucas should be drawn and quartered for creating the prequels, perhaps castrayed. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, so we're stuck with a pile of steaming shit. You can see how this relates. Really if the West united in some Tolkienesque alliance of good feelings, I'd be all for it. However that's like picking teams at recess; the good kids almost always end up on one team, and while the other kids might play, they're going to be permanently pissed off. I'm waiting for the next transportation revolution that can get my ass to Germany for the beer, Japan for lunch, and back to Italy for the coffee in all of 5 hours. In the interim I expect to be able to post to poe-news, and play WoW. Chop-chop people.
I think the British Claimed the U.S. and India less than 500 years ago... So claiming shit gives jurisdiction? I mean holy hell, we paid Mexico (a pitance) for California, maybe we should get a rebate now that it's populated by the collective genius that elected the govenator.
According to the Tibetans (and demographics proably agree with them) China moved in about 1949, colonized, and said the Ming Dynasty had originally conquered the territory therefore the communist forces had a right to it based on the likeness Chairman Mao bore to a cloud in the sky the day they decided that was good enough reason to take over the territory without international uproar. If that sounds like confusing made up bullshit, then understanding has been conveyed.
Taiwan is not it's own country because Nixon was intelligent enough to know that he could say that with a straight face and no one would know he was full of shit in his lifetime. While the amount of shit he was filled with was speculated on, it probably hasn't been until recently that scientists have determined he was full of it. Don't get me wrong, I'd trade a thousand Clintons, and 5000 Shrubbery for one Tricky Dick, but that doesn't mean people today should not get what he was doing.
China's environmental agency is staffed by about 300 people. They have sixteen of the worlds most polluting cities, and while nuclear power would be cleaner and nicer, coal usage is expected to double by 2030. The perks of signing as a developing nation perhaps? It isn't that the U.S. is inefficient in it's polluting, it just happens to produce far more energy than any other nation. That's little comfort to California citizens who shell out tons of money to avoid brownouts, but I imagine everyone else there appreciates the power.