The whole thing still smacks of irrational fear. No different than the Osamas in Pajamas hiding under the stairs. God forbid people actually, you know...pay attention to their kids?
However, I think its not so much about the probability of sex vs probability of violence. Lets look at US history for just a brief moment. Who came here first? Oh thats right the uber puritans...you know...scarlet letter and all. The folks that believed it was perfectly natural to burn whiches, stone whores, drown the nonbelievers, cut out tongues, and any other number of horrifically violent things...and these horrific and violent responses were frequently in response to that horribly impure and immoral SEX!. So this stuff has been ingrained into American thought from day 1. Sex is horrible and impure and an affront to God, violence on the other hand is frequently used to glorify God, so the choice of violence vs sex seems pretty easy, how else could you possibly justify stoning the whore?
The more people that rattle the cage early on the less likely we will come to have our own incident like what happened in China that day. The trick that our current government has learned, and learned quite well, is that bloody events and oppression is terribly difficult to maintain. Pacify the people and keep them scared while acting as their "defender" is the proper way of doing business, and it works quite well because so many people pull out that card of "Well see how worse it is there"...yes...it is worse there...because noone stood up before it got that far, and their government has made the mistake of being overtly heavy handed rather than covertly undermining our freedoms in the name of security.
The two main problems here is this, and I suspect you can appreciate at least one of them as being close to home for you. 1. Through all of this our government has maintained the "but we looove china" dealings with them, and while we wave this "evil Saddam" banner to charge off into ill planned war we make China (who is a FAR cry more dangerous AND evil) most favored trade nation. 2. The less freedom the American people have, the cheaper your life is when it is traded on the field of battle. I am proud of all who serve, I feel pity for those who die to defend the freedoms of people who willingly give them away to the government at the first sign of trouble.
Actually the world IS painted into two nice camps, its just that those two camps aren't the same for anyone. ME and NOT ME, and all our behaviors and decisions, good or bad, ultimately revolve around those two camps. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not so well:)
No this is real life. And in real life grouping rape, murder, etc in with lying to your friends about something is insane at best. Further, I never once said anything about good people vs bad people. I said the type of people who are typically into geneology as a hobby are usually not the types to be involved in crimes that involve leaving DNA evidence around, unless they were the victim. That doesn't even begin to say that they are good people as you would suggest with your all good people do bad things (implying rape, murder, and other DNA evidence type things). They may be extorting their company for millions of dollars a year...thus a bad person anyways...but you don't generally leave DNA evidence while cooking financial documents now do you?
Additionally, anyone who justifies killing anyone for really any other reason other than "He is trying to kill me and I better try to kill him back" should be classified as mentally ill. This was a discussion about crimes involving DNA evidence and the type of behavior typical of the criminals that commit those crimes. Sure there is an odd one every now and then that doesn't fit the profile, but the VAST majority of criminals involved in "oops I left my DNA there" are pretty far from anything considered normal. John Wayne Gacy SEEMED normal, but I imagine having a hobby of something like geneology would have taken too much time away from his hobby of dressing up like a clown and then raping and murdering young boys, so no "seems" normal defense allowed here.
Just gunna go out on a limb here, but I suspect that you are more likely to find the DNA match of a victim than a criminal. I may just be making broad generalizations here but I would suspect that most of the people who would submit their DNA to Ancestory.com are not the same type of people who go leaving their DNA at crime scenes, let alone are every around any crime scenes as anything other than a victim.
Uhm...they aren't being "open" about it except for their blatant violation of the law. What they are being is incompetent about it. Thats like telling me the guy who shoots up a bunch of people in the mall was being "open" about it and assigning some virtue to that, but the guy that shoots them in the dark alley wasn't.
The upshot is at least people are becoming aware of the fact that they have been being tapped. Not that much has been done about this other than Congress signing stuff that says "illegal wiretapping is illegal" as if that wasn't the most redundant and moronic waste of time and money they have come up with yet. I actually am convinced that it even surpasses the unanimous vote that "cancer is bad" (except for the 3 people who abstained from voting, probably because they were busy giving breast exams to hookers).
I think the gestapo tactics, the extraditions, the jail time, and all of that are insane responses to copyright infringement, however, at some point it becomes a matter of common sense. Don't poke the bear. Everyone understands money buys a great deal of sway in the world. Everyone understands that these people have lots of money and want to squeeze everyone for more. Everyone should be perfectly clear right, wrong, or otherwise that screwing with these people is the last thing you should do. Should we defend the old woman who is being sued when she didn't download, yes, should we be outraged at the lawsuit launched against a 5yr old (or however old she was), yes, should we be in arms about piracy havens getting shut down or those guys getting tossed in jail, not so much. The real banner we should be waving should read "Punish them! Punish them justly!" because quite frankly I feel very little pity for them, they knew what they were doing, they knew the risk, its not right that they should get punished so severely, but I don't feel any need to defend them beyond "well, maybe you should just fine the bejesus out of him and put him on probation".
People like to do this victimless crime thing with this, and that is just plain stupid and a horrible understanding of economics. Yes, not all downloads would equal a sale, however, music and movies are FAR more likely to have been a sale instead of a download. So now all the local store owners who would have otherwise gotten a sale, now didn't, and he lost his investment on that item. Megalomart can afford that kind of loss. Dave's Music World owned and operated by local music fan Dave can't. So on top of everything else, it helps the despised megachains push further in, and force local business out.
Seeing who is sharing How_Democracy_Failed.doc is of terrible interest to the government. All the illegal downloading makes for excellent justification to dig around watching everything. Yes there is plenty of legal stuff being shared...but if you honestly believe that legal material being moved even begins to compare to the amount of illegal stuff I have some nice beach front property in Nebraska to sell you. So while these groups are acting like the internet gestapo, we should all thank the greedy little brats downloading illegal crap and trying to justify it with "the artists are screwed", "its a bad business model", "there is legal stuff there", and whatnot for giving them such great ammunition to destroy the internet.
Its all related because MPAA, RIAA, BSA are all internet gestapo when it comes to this downloading thing. The people who go on about how there is legal stuff on torrent are two things...they are right...and they are stupid. Of coarse there is legal stuff to download on the internet, and of coarse just about any way to transmit data can be used in a legal fashion, the vast majority of the traffic is not legal, and if it was mostly legal traffic then you wouldn't see these gestapo tactics. Music, movies, or software, there are a million justifications from "the artists are getting screwed" to "the artist doesn't care" to "they charge too much" to "its a bad business model" but the fact remains it is indeed their ball and they can take it and go home. You don't like it, don't buy their crap, violating copyrights and then trying to justify it through all these nonsense reasons is just stupid, childish, and greedy, and that is exactly what people do with this.
Ultimately, the greedy little children that download this crap and justify it are just as much of the problem as the **AA groups are. If the community outed them, didn't support them, and otherwise dealt with them, then we wouldn't have the gestapo trying to destroy the internet to get at them. Police your own before someone else decides to do it. Freedom and all is a great cause to make a stand on, but downloading leetsoftware.rar, britney_spears_I'm_a_whore.mp3, hot_pron.wma, and blockbuster_release.mpg for free is not even remotely the same thing. In the mean time it provides excellent justification for these people to step in and tromp on our rights so they can come knock on your door when they catch you sharing How_Democracy_Failed.doc. The government's primary job is to manage interstate commerce and the like, and this without a doubt falls well inside their area of responsibility.
Poor little copyright violators are going to have to find a new source to steal from while making high and mighty moral claims about how evil the **AA groups are. I think the RIAA and MPAA can rot, and sincerely hope that this trend of the government to support their broken business model of attacking the citizens with insane claims ends soon. However, I am so sick of people getting up in arms about these shutdowns, and then wave their tiny little banner of "but bittorrent is used for legal stuff" yeah...so...it is...but I would guess that most of the people who parade out that silly argument have never used it for anything legal themselves, and just continue to download copyrighted works.
In a nutshell, get some self discipline and quit crying. I think all of the illegal download places should be shut down permanently. These stupid people cry about prices of software, about treatment of customers, and then they get the software and use it anyways. So, the company still gets its massive userbase knowing full well that many will be illegal copies, but as long as it grows their market share they will get more sales in the long run than what anyone "stole" from them. I went to linux because I can get any of the software I could need easily (no crack/serial/download searching) free (no astronomical sticker prices), and legally (no mega fines, or any of the recent trend of jail terms) and actually pay for the tiny amount of Win32 software that I ever use. The same goes with music, I just don't buy it anymore. And here is a shocker folks, when you don't use OS/Software from the commercial world who cuts all the stupid DRM deals...when you DO put one of those "copyright protection highjacker" type disks in that install all manner of rootkit type garbage...not much happens.
In closing, for all you who are going to respond to this... If you are doing so from an illegal install of Windows or other OS... Go switch to a legal alternative through download or purchase before you even bother.
You are all wrong. Due to the new super executive powers that is all gone. Assuming you ignore all the vote fraud stuff as of late and say that our voting system is healthy and functioning properly, what we have is a democratically elected dictatorship with corporate sponsorship. Wake me up when the government actually does something for the people. Even the new "consumer protection" bankruptcy laws are actually pro corporate laws designed to give everyone one last chance to try and squeeze blood out of a rock before allowing them to declare bankruptcy. People assume just because we aren't directly being oppressed and forced to live in poor conditions that we all should be happy that we live in a free society. Well wake up folks, they have learned from history, a happy and complacent populace doesn't revolt. So as long as we are happy with our gadgets and distracted by Paris Hilton, they can take damn near anything they want from us in slow fashions and we don't react at all, all the while defending to the rest of the world how great and free our government is.
Its about rebroadcasting in any form be it played, printed, or freaking tapped out in morse code. Go look at all of their moves together, not at each individual move they make. They want protection and money for anything that even remotely resembles something that could possibly be maybe construed as somehow distantly related to anything they might have done. This is hardly the first attack of its kind, nor is it likely to be the last.
Writing down what they hear and sharing with other people is not significantly different from playing what you hear and sharing it with other people. So you are right, its not about memorization, but playing the song by ear for others to hear is no different (and actually even worse for garage bands who get paid for the performance, not the ads floating on stage) than writing down what you hear and sharing that. The lyric sites have been under assault for typing the words that they hear from the song...how long is it before you aren't allowed to tell someone those same words instead of writing them down?
In the mean time, poor little Johnny is in trouble for listening to the radio and playing a song by ear. Thanks to various lobby groups Gonzales got his 2007 uber copyright law passed. Johnny told Sally that he learned how to play Metallica's latest song We Eat Cock and the wiretaps picked it up. The department of Homeland Security was forced to turn over the records to the RIAA and now we have poor Johnny selling everything he owns to settle out of court to not go to jail.
No...this copyright bullshit and their lobbyist bastards have gone WAY too far. So first off I don't respect any of their rights (nor do I consume any of their garbage anyways) because they refuse to respect any of mine. This crap kills cover bands (again, can't say I'm sad personally, but its a little bad for the aspiring garage band). Metallica themselves, the master bastards of this crap started as a coverband (again, maybe if we kill all future Metallicas before they grow into large assclown bands its a good thing). This crap hurts the arts in far more ways than it "protects" the copyright owners, because tons of people learn to play music this way. Further, it is a slippery slope of the worst degree, these people aren't breaking into recording studios and stealing the original tabs to put on the internet for big money. They are listening to songs, writing down how it is played by ear, and then showing others. So now I can't tell you the plot of a movie or a book if I remember it too accurately and tell you too much? So how accurate does a book/movie review have to be before it gets into hot water? (Lets face reality, this is NOT the same thing as memorizing War and Peace word for word, this is more like memorizing a Bob the Builder book word for word). If I memorize the words of a book and tell the story to my children am I violating copyright? Or maybe I am getting a bit older, I write it down so I don't forget I told that story to them when the were little and I give them a copy when they get older, now am I getting sued? As far as the website making money on the ads, good on them, it costs money to run a site like that, and they aren't selling the tabs (which would likely be a real copyright issue since they are making money on the copyrighted works themselves).
Actually I heard there was a much less reported scandal here. It seems that a number of senior officials from the government and Halliburton were there with large reams of papers that they had written various titles onto. The whole thing was discovered when they found "Hairy Poter and the ordur of the Fenix" written in George Bush's handwriting among the stacks.
I will point out that he actually was talking about a decline in the number of people who read for pleasure, not who are able to read. So it really isn't about literacy like the title/summary would lead you to believe, but hey this is/. what do you expect?
Actually, since most of that information is important before the child is able to read, it would really be the responsibility of the parents to read to them. Of coarse these days that wouldn't happen, do you think parents that can't bother to just hit the power button when their kids watch/play violent movies/games would actually read to their children? So it really wouldn't be about dumb kids being dead, so much as it would be about dumb parents not being able to keep kids alive. Which I don't think would really combat illiteracy all that much, except maybe to impress the importance of reading upon children so that when they grow up they know to read those books to THEIR kids. However, it would sure as hell fix alot of other problems related to the government replacement for parenting that goes on these days.
Wait a minute... Allah is opening Virgin-Mart? Hmmm... I think "Follow my word and gain entrance to Virgin Mart" is a bit more motivating than "Listen to me or else you will burn for all eternity". This is common human behavior, one leads to fanatics scrambling to get into Virgin Mart, the other leads to groups of people trying to lay low and be just good enough followers to not burn forever.
Their governments suck, their religious behavior tends to be pretty bad, but damn is their God better... Promise of Virgin-Mart vs promise of burning in hell...
I think we are pretty much in agreement side a few details and interpretations. The civilian government said "Don't torture" and then gave a wink and a nod. The current administration has made a nightmare of Iraq, I don't think it has much at all to do with the military. For example, you could compare the reconstruction work that was done by no bid contracts awarded to the administrations favorite war company to the reconstruction work done by the various military civil engineering units.
As far as training goes, it takes a great deal of training to operate modern military equipment. Tanks, jets, ships, satellites, radios, computers, and all manner of other complex things. Now as far as the grunt with the gun, who actually does feel the 'war is hell' part more than anyone else in the military...well there is good reason that our rifles and guns have not gotten any more complicated than flip switch pull trigger. In fact M-16s are no longer fully auto because it was determined that the panicky young man in a firefight was burning off all his ammo not letting go of the trigger. So they simplified the weapon so he simply can't do it that way now. The modern concept is force multipliers, that all the highly trained guys flying jets, driving tanks, operating communications stuff or surveillance stuff multiply the force of the grunt with the gun so that it takes fewer grunts with guns to achieve the same results. The grunts with guns end of things is quite capable of being filled by people with considerably less training, so long as they listen to the highly trained people telling them where to go and what to shoot.
The problem with Iraq is that our administration created some insane bullshit stories, went charging in with barely a plan, and now they are stuck because the Iraqis didn't come out waving American flags like they did last time (oops, when we pulled out and Saddam killed all those folks, maybe they shoulda guessed that this generation of Iraqis wouldn't be amused). Those idiots have mismanaged the military to a frightening degree, and have made an even bigger mess of this crap because it was all about his political cronies running the show (Thank god Rummy is finally gone). The real shame is that 70% of Americans believe that Saddam/Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and its military generals these days that are calling Bush on his lies about the terrorists in Iraq (former CENTCOM commander making statements explaining Al Q, our favorite boogeyman organization, wasn't in Iraq in force until AFTER we went in). Remember, while Bush chastises congress for micromanaging the military, it has nothing to do with why you shouldn't micromanage the military, it is because HE is "the decider" and now "the commander" and he wants to make sure they don't get in his way of micromanaging things. (Thankfully it seems they are finally breaking from that and the new commander out there seems to be actually getting things slowly turned around)
I absolutely agree with your last statement, but will add this. Let us remember those that died serving their nation who lost their lives to the poor causes, the political causes, and other such nonsense, because history will always remember the heroes that made that same sacrifice in times of true national emergency. Too many times service members are demonized because they happened to be serving during an unpopular fight, few seem to care that they made the choice to serve.
You are aware of what was happening in 1941 right? I mean, I know ignorant opinionated drivel like yours can be lazy, but I would assume you have at least been through the basic history of the whole WWI/WWII/Cold War progression.
Beyond that, you are yet another one of those fools that blames the military for any of this crap. The military does what it is told to do by civilian authority, just like the constitution says. The civilians say they can't do something, and that means they can't do it. You want to fix this, quit bitching and trying to screw over the men that serve their nation, and go fix the men that serve themselves (politicians). Further, while not paying politicians sounds very attractive, it would just further the whole lobbyist problem. When the military DOESN'T do what the civilians tell them, you have a military coop, and I am reasonably certain you would rather have the military continue to follow bullshit directives from idiot civilians that you can replace democratically than have to deal with a military coop (which by the way would probably rather quick once you opted to quit paying them).
The idea that you could fight and win in modern warfare just by grabbing a bunch of untrained people and not paying them is just unbelievably ignorant of what the military does. Beyond that, I seriously doubt you are aware of or give a damn about what the military does that ISN'T part of our idiot politicians agendas. The US military is usually one of the first responders to natural disasters globally, and other humanitarian things. Here, this is why we should definitely quit paying them.
Not really. Something like that would only hurt the people trying to get their refunds for the MS crap they didn't want but were forced to buy. It would also be used as fodder by MS in their "Get the Facts" crap about the cost of linux.
Most of these things can be broken down into reasonably small parts. Especially the actual "WMD" part of the weapon. Hence the fear of breifcase bombs because Russia is missing so much material. Is a reasonable person going to chase down every Iraqi with a breifcase large enough to hold some vials of nasty, or nuclear material (Note: I said reasonable, which pretty much removes everyone in Washington from this point).
That is my key problem with the "See no WMDs!" crowd. They are the ignorant defenders of Saddam (and in a strange way Cheney and Rummy and crew for supporting Saddam in the early years). No...he had them, we all knew he did. The lie was the immediate threat crap. Most of the critical parts can be broken down or disguised as conventional weaponry and hidden, moved, or sold. You can't assume that we would have caught him if he had moved them.
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The whole thing still smacks of irrational fear. No different than the Osamas in Pajamas hiding under the stairs. God forbid people actually, you know...pay attention to their kids?
However, I think its not so much about the probability of sex vs probability of violence. Lets look at US history for just a brief moment. Who came here first? Oh thats right the uber puritans...you know...scarlet letter and all. The folks that believed it was perfectly natural to burn whiches, stone whores, drown the nonbelievers, cut out tongues, and any other number of horrifically violent things...and these horrific and violent responses were frequently in response to that horribly impure and immoral SEX!. So this stuff has been ingrained into American thought from day 1. Sex is horrible and impure and an affront to God, violence on the other hand is frequently used to glorify God, so the choice of violence vs sex seems pretty easy, how else could you possibly justify stoning the whore?
The more people that rattle the cage early on the less likely we will come to have our own incident like what happened in China that day. The trick that our current government has learned, and learned quite well, is that bloody events and oppression is terribly difficult to maintain. Pacify the people and keep them scared while acting as their "defender" is the proper way of doing business, and it works quite well because so many people pull out that card of "Well see how worse it is there"...yes...it is worse there...because noone stood up before it got that far, and their government has made the mistake of being overtly heavy handed rather than covertly undermining our freedoms in the name of security.
The two main problems here is this, and I suspect you can appreciate at least one of them as being close to home for you. 1. Through all of this our government has maintained the "but we looove china" dealings with them, and while we wave this "evil Saddam" banner to charge off into ill planned war we make China (who is a FAR cry more dangerous AND evil) most favored trade nation. 2. The less freedom the American people have, the cheaper your life is when it is traded on the field of battle. I am proud of all who serve, I feel pity for those who die to defend the freedoms of people who willingly give them away to the government at the first sign of trouble.
Actually the world IS painted into two nice camps, its just that those two camps aren't the same for anyone. ME and NOT ME, and all our behaviors and decisions, good or bad, ultimately revolve around those two camps. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not so well :)
No this is real life. And in real life grouping rape, murder, etc in with lying to your friends about something is insane at best. Further, I never once said anything about good people vs bad people. I said the type of people who are typically into geneology as a hobby are usually not the types to be involved in crimes that involve leaving DNA evidence around, unless they were the victim. That doesn't even begin to say that they are good people as you would suggest with your all good people do bad things (implying rape, murder, and other DNA evidence type things). They may be extorting their company for millions of dollars a year...thus a bad person anyways...but you don't generally leave DNA evidence while cooking financial documents now do you?
Additionally, anyone who justifies killing anyone for really any other reason other than "He is trying to kill me and I better try to kill him back" should be classified as mentally ill. This was a discussion about crimes involving DNA evidence and the type of behavior typical of the criminals that commit those crimes. Sure there is an odd one every now and then that doesn't fit the profile, but the VAST majority of criminals involved in "oops I left my DNA there" are pretty far from anything considered normal. John Wayne Gacy SEEMED normal, but I imagine having a hobby of something like geneology would have taken too much time away from his hobby of dressing up like a clown and then raping and murdering young boys, so no "seems" normal defense allowed here.
MS: "Bitch Gimme the money!" *slap* RH: *BANG* "Goodbye G-Money".
Just gunna go out on a limb here, but I suspect that you are more likely to find the DNA match of a victim than a criminal. I may just be making broad generalizations here but I would suspect that most of the people who would submit their DNA to Ancestory.com are not the same type of people who go leaving their DNA at crime scenes, let alone are every around any crime scenes as anything other than a victim.
Uhm...they aren't being "open" about it except for their blatant violation of the law. What they are being is incompetent about it. Thats like telling me the guy who shoots up a bunch of people in the mall was being "open" about it and assigning some virtue to that, but the guy that shoots them in the dark alley wasn't.
The upshot is at least people are becoming aware of the fact that they have been being tapped. Not that much has been done about this other than Congress signing stuff that says "illegal wiretapping is illegal" as if that wasn't the most redundant and moronic waste of time and money they have come up with yet. I actually am convinced that it even surpasses the unanimous vote that "cancer is bad" (except for the 3 people who abstained from voting, probably because they were busy giving breast exams to hookers).
I think the gestapo tactics, the extraditions, the jail time, and all of that are insane responses to copyright infringement, however, at some point it becomes a matter of common sense. Don't poke the bear. Everyone understands money buys a great deal of sway in the world. Everyone understands that these people have lots of money and want to squeeze everyone for more. Everyone should be perfectly clear right, wrong, or otherwise that screwing with these people is the last thing you should do. Should we defend the old woman who is being sued when she didn't download, yes, should we be outraged at the lawsuit launched against a 5yr old (or however old she was), yes, should we be in arms about piracy havens getting shut down or those guys getting tossed in jail, not so much. The real banner we should be waving should read "Punish them! Punish them justly!" because quite frankly I feel very little pity for them, they knew what they were doing, they knew the risk, its not right that they should get punished so severely, but I don't feel any need to defend them beyond "well, maybe you should just fine the bejesus out of him and put him on probation".
People like to do this victimless crime thing with this, and that is just plain stupid and a horrible understanding of economics. Yes, not all downloads would equal a sale, however, music and movies are FAR more likely to have been a sale instead of a download. So now all the local store owners who would have otherwise gotten a sale, now didn't, and he lost his investment on that item. Megalomart can afford that kind of loss. Dave's Music World owned and operated by local music fan Dave can't. So on top of everything else, it helps the despised megachains push further in, and force local business out.
Seeing who is sharing How_Democracy_Failed.doc is of terrible interest to the government. All the illegal downloading makes for excellent justification to dig around watching everything. Yes there is plenty of legal stuff being shared...but if you honestly believe that legal material being moved even begins to compare to the amount of illegal stuff I have some nice beach front property in Nebraska to sell you. So while these groups are acting like the internet gestapo, we should all thank the greedy little brats downloading illegal crap and trying to justify it with "the artists are screwed", "its a bad business model", "there is legal stuff there", and whatnot for giving them such great ammunition to destroy the internet.
Its all related because MPAA, RIAA, BSA are all internet gestapo when it comes to this downloading thing. The people who go on about how there is legal stuff on torrent are two things...they are right...and they are stupid. Of coarse there is legal stuff to download on the internet, and of coarse just about any way to transmit data can be used in a legal fashion, the vast majority of the traffic is not legal, and if it was mostly legal traffic then you wouldn't see these gestapo tactics. Music, movies, or software, there are a million justifications from "the artists are getting screwed" to "the artist doesn't care" to "they charge too much" to "its a bad business model" but the fact remains it is indeed their ball and they can take it and go home. You don't like it, don't buy their crap, violating copyrights and then trying to justify it through all these nonsense reasons is just stupid, childish, and greedy, and that is exactly what people do with this.
Ultimately, the greedy little children that download this crap and justify it are just as much of the problem as the **AA groups are. If the community outed them, didn't support them, and otherwise dealt with them, then we wouldn't have the gestapo trying to destroy the internet to get at them. Police your own before someone else decides to do it. Freedom and all is a great cause to make a stand on, but downloading leetsoftware.rar, britney_spears_I'm_a_whore.mp3, hot_pron.wma, and blockbuster_release.mpg for free is not even remotely the same thing. In the mean time it provides excellent justification for these people to step in and tromp on our rights so they can come knock on your door when they catch you sharing How_Democracy_Failed.doc. The government's primary job is to manage interstate commerce and the like, and this without a doubt falls well inside their area of responsibility.
Poor little copyright violators are going to have to find a new source to steal from while making high and mighty moral claims about how evil the **AA groups are. I think the RIAA and MPAA can rot, and sincerely hope that this trend of the government to support their broken business model of attacking the citizens with insane claims ends soon. However, I am so sick of people getting up in arms about these shutdowns, and then wave their tiny little banner of "but bittorrent is used for legal stuff" yeah...so...it is...but I would guess that most of the people who parade out that silly argument have never used it for anything legal themselves, and just continue to download copyrighted works.
In a nutshell, get some self discipline and quit crying. I think all of the illegal download places should be shut down permanently. These stupid people cry about prices of software, about treatment of customers, and then they get the software and use it anyways. So, the company still gets its massive userbase knowing full well that many will be illegal copies, but as long as it grows their market share they will get more sales in the long run than what anyone "stole" from them. I went to linux because I can get any of the software I could need easily (no crack/serial/download searching) free (no astronomical sticker prices), and legally (no mega fines, or any of the recent trend of jail terms) and actually pay for the tiny amount of Win32 software that I ever use. The same goes with music, I just don't buy it anymore. And here is a shocker folks, when you don't use OS/Software from the commercial world who cuts all the stupid DRM deals...when you DO put one of those "copyright protection highjacker" type disks in that install all manner of rootkit type garbage...not much happens.
In closing, for all you who are going to respond to this... If you are doing so from an illegal install of Windows or other OS... Go switch to a legal alternative through download or purchase before you even bother.
You are all wrong. Due to the new super executive powers that is all gone. Assuming you ignore all the vote fraud stuff as of late and say that our voting system is healthy and functioning properly, what we have is a democratically elected dictatorship with corporate sponsorship. Wake me up when the government actually does something for the people. Even the new "consumer protection" bankruptcy laws are actually pro corporate laws designed to give everyone one last chance to try and squeeze blood out of a rock before allowing them to declare bankruptcy. People assume just because we aren't directly being oppressed and forced to live in poor conditions that we all should be happy that we live in a free society. Well wake up folks, they have learned from history, a happy and complacent populace doesn't revolt. So as long as we are happy with our gadgets and distracted by Paris Hilton, they can take damn near anything they want from us in slow fashions and we don't react at all, all the while defending to the rest of the world how great and free our government is.
I'm not sure, but I think you just insulted a truck full of turnips.
Its about rebroadcasting in any form be it played, printed, or freaking tapped out in morse code. Go look at all of their moves together, not at each individual move they make. They want protection and money for anything that even remotely resembles something that could possibly be maybe construed as somehow distantly related to anything they might have done. This is hardly the first attack of its kind, nor is it likely to be the last.
Writing down what they hear and sharing with other people is not significantly different from playing what you hear and sharing it with other people. So you are right, its not about memorization, but playing the song by ear for others to hear is no different (and actually even worse for garage bands who get paid for the performance, not the ads floating on stage) than writing down what you hear and sharing that. The lyric sites have been under assault for typing the words that they hear from the song...how long is it before you aren't allowed to tell someone those same words instead of writing them down?
In the mean time, poor little Johnny is in trouble for listening to the radio and playing a song by ear. Thanks to various lobby groups Gonzales got his 2007 uber copyright law passed. Johnny told Sally that he learned how to play Metallica's latest song We Eat Cock and the wiretaps picked it up. The department of Homeland Security was forced to turn over the records to the RIAA and now we have poor Johnny selling everything he owns to settle out of court to not go to jail.
No...this copyright bullshit and their lobbyist bastards have gone WAY too far. So first off I don't respect any of their rights (nor do I consume any of their garbage anyways) because they refuse to respect any of mine. This crap kills cover bands (again, can't say I'm sad personally, but its a little bad for the aspiring garage band). Metallica themselves, the master bastards of this crap started as a coverband (again, maybe if we kill all future Metallicas before they grow into large assclown bands its a good thing). This crap hurts the arts in far more ways than it "protects" the copyright owners, because tons of people learn to play music this way. Further, it is a slippery slope of the worst degree, these people aren't breaking into recording studios and stealing the original tabs to put on the internet for big money. They are listening to songs, writing down how it is played by ear, and then showing others. So now I can't tell you the plot of a movie or a book if I remember it too accurately and tell you too much? So how accurate does a book/movie review have to be before it gets into hot water? (Lets face reality, this is NOT the same thing as memorizing War and Peace word for word, this is more like memorizing a Bob the Builder book word for word). If I memorize the words of a book and tell the story to my children am I violating copyright? Or maybe I am getting a bit older, I write it down so I don't forget I told that story to them when the were little and I give them a copy when they get older, now am I getting sued? As far as the website making money on the ads, good on them, it costs money to run a site like that, and they aren't selling the tabs (which would likely be a real copyright issue since they are making money on the copyrighted works themselves).
Right, that is exactly what he is upset about. More people would prefer to watch the movie than read the book. Reading is fairly timeless.
Actually I heard there was a much less reported scandal here. It seems that a number of senior officials from the government and Halliburton were there with large reams of papers that they had written various titles onto. The whole thing was discovered when they found "Hairy Poter and the ordur of the Fenix" written in George Bush's handwriting among the stacks.
I will point out that he actually was talking about a decline in the number of people who read for pleasure, not who are able to read. So it really isn't about literacy like the title/summary would lead you to believe, but hey this is /. what do you expect?
Actually, since most of that information is important before the child is able to read, it would really be the responsibility of the parents to read to them. Of coarse these days that wouldn't happen, do you think parents that can't bother to just hit the power button when their kids watch/play violent movies/games would actually read to their children? So it really wouldn't be about dumb kids being dead, so much as it would be about dumb parents not being able to keep kids alive. Which I don't think would really combat illiteracy all that much, except maybe to impress the importance of reading upon children so that when they grow up they know to read those books to THEIR kids. However, it would sure as hell fix alot of other problems related to the government replacement for parenting that goes on these days.
Wait a minute... Allah is opening Virgin-Mart? Hmmm... I think "Follow my word and gain entrance to Virgin Mart" is a bit more motivating than "Listen to me or else you will burn for all eternity". This is common human behavior, one leads to fanatics scrambling to get into Virgin Mart, the other leads to groups of people trying to lay low and be just good enough followers to not burn forever.
Their governments suck, their religious behavior tends to be pretty bad, but damn is their God better... Promise of Virgin-Mart vs promise of burning in hell...
Wow...I didn't even realize I typed that wrong. Guess I get a little fired up by the "blame the evil military" groops. :)
I think we are pretty much in agreement side a few details and interpretations. The civilian government said "Don't torture" and then gave a wink and a nod. The current administration has made a nightmare of Iraq, I don't think it has much at all to do with the military. For example, you could compare the reconstruction work that was done by no bid contracts awarded to the administrations favorite war company to the reconstruction work done by the various military civil engineering units.
As far as training goes, it takes a great deal of training to operate modern military equipment. Tanks, jets, ships, satellites, radios, computers, and all manner of other complex things. Now as far as the grunt with the gun, who actually does feel the 'war is hell' part more than anyone else in the military...well there is good reason that our rifles and guns have not gotten any more complicated than flip switch pull trigger. In fact M-16s are no longer fully auto because it was determined that the panicky young man in a firefight was burning off all his ammo not letting go of the trigger. So they simplified the weapon so he simply can't do it that way now. The modern concept is force multipliers, that all the highly trained guys flying jets, driving tanks, operating communications stuff or surveillance stuff multiply the force of the grunt with the gun so that it takes fewer grunts with guns to achieve the same results. The grunts with guns end of things is quite capable of being filled by people with considerably less training, so long as they listen to the highly trained people telling them where to go and what to shoot.
The problem with Iraq is that our administration created some insane bullshit stories, went charging in with barely a plan, and now they are stuck because the Iraqis didn't come out waving American flags like they did last time (oops, when we pulled out and Saddam killed all those folks, maybe they shoulda guessed that this generation of Iraqis wouldn't be amused). Those idiots have mismanaged the military to a frightening degree, and have made an even bigger mess of this crap because it was all about his political cronies running the show (Thank god Rummy is finally gone). The real shame is that 70% of Americans believe that Saddam/Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and its military generals these days that are calling Bush on his lies about the terrorists in Iraq (former CENTCOM commander making statements explaining Al Q, our favorite boogeyman organization, wasn't in Iraq in force until AFTER we went in). Remember, while Bush chastises congress for micromanaging the military, it has nothing to do with why you shouldn't micromanage the military, it is because HE is "the decider" and now "the commander" and he wants to make sure they don't get in his way of micromanaging things. (Thankfully it seems they are finally breaking from that and the new commander out there seems to be actually getting things slowly turned around)
I absolutely agree with your last statement, but will add this. Let us remember those that died serving their nation who lost their lives to the poor causes, the political causes, and other such nonsense, because history will always remember the heroes that made that same sacrifice in times of true national emergency. Too many times service members are demonized because they happened to be serving during an unpopular fight, few seem to care that they made the choice to serve.
You are aware of what was happening in 1941 right? I mean, I know ignorant opinionated drivel like yours can be lazy, but I would assume you have at least been through the basic history of the whole WWI/WWII/Cold War progression.
Beyond that, you are yet another one of those fools that blames the military for any of this crap. The military does what it is told to do by civilian authority, just like the constitution says. The civilians say they can't do something, and that means they can't do it. You want to fix this, quit bitching and trying to screw over the men that serve their nation, and go fix the men that serve themselves (politicians). Further, while not paying politicians sounds very attractive, it would just further the whole lobbyist problem. When the military DOESN'T do what the civilians tell them, you have a military coop, and I am reasonably certain you would rather have the military continue to follow bullshit directives from idiot civilians that you can replace democratically than have to deal with a military coop (which by the way would probably rather quick once you opted to quit paying them).
The idea that you could fight and win in modern warfare just by grabbing a bunch of untrained people and not paying them is just unbelievably ignorant of what the military does. Beyond that, I seriously doubt you are aware of or give a damn about what the military does that ISN'T part of our idiot politicians agendas. The US military is usually one of the first responders to natural disasters globally, and other humanitarian things. Here, this is why we should definitely quit paying them.
Not really. Something like that would only hurt the people trying to get their refunds for the MS crap they didn't want but were forced to buy. It would also be used as fodder by MS in their "Get the Facts" crap about the cost of linux.
Most of these things can be broken down into reasonably small parts. Especially the actual "WMD" part of the weapon. Hence the fear of breifcase bombs because Russia is missing so much material. Is a reasonable person going to chase down every Iraqi with a breifcase large enough to hold some vials of nasty, or nuclear material (Note: I said reasonable, which pretty much removes everyone in Washington from this point).
That is my key problem with the "See no WMDs!" crowd. They are the ignorant defenders of Saddam (and in a strange way Cheney and Rummy and crew for supporting Saddam in the early years). No...he had them, we all knew he did. The lie was the immediate threat crap. Most of the critical parts can be broken down or disguised as conventional weaponry and hidden, moved, or sold. You can't assume that we would have caught him if he had moved them.