The universal access fee isn't a case of the government taxing you and spending the money on starting up a business to compete with existing enterprises.
The Universal Access fee, I believe, is a tax that the FCC collects from long distance carriers who use local switches.
and the ~15 other taxes on telephone services that are plowed back into ILECs.
Such as?
Recall that UA was originally about capital investment in sparse areas.
I thought it had to do with affordable telecom access for low-income consumers, but it's two sides of the same coin, really.
That has more than been payed for and depreciated by now, and (I can't find a link for it now, unfortunately) but a report by the ILECs themselves showed that UA is pure profit now. And it has only been going up.
Having not seen the report, I'll take you at your word on this. So all of the UA buildout is done and the government continues to levy the AUF? And then people wonder why so many Americans oppose new taxes. They never go away. The government creates new revenue streams for itself with this kind of legislation, and you're more likely to separate Michael Moore from a Twinkie than the government from your money. These things never go away, even when they most clearly should. I share your ire.
Regardless, this is not a case of the government taxing the population and using the money to set up services that will compete with existing enterprises.
I think your definitions might be a little crossed:defense [reference.com].
I believe the word you were looking for was imperialist [reference.com].
Neither definition fits well, frankly.
As for the filibuster, the filibuster is necessary to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Funny, I don't recall anybody characterizing the majority as tyrannical when it tried to enact the platform upon which it ran during the elections when that majority was the Democratic party.
Read the damn federalist papers sometime.
I have. It's on my list to re-read but right now it's stuck behind The Wealth of Nations, which can be a bear to get through.
And your private business is just like verizon, which doesn't get any tax money, either.
Oh, wait.
I can't respond intelligently to your statement unless you clarify it. What government tax money are you referring to? Businesses receive tons of government money for a number of different reasons. Which are you referring to?
What gives your private business the right to a profit if it can't even do better than the government? You know, the infamously inefficient bureaucracy with the customer service department staffed by bona fide Vogons?
My private business doesn't get to tax people and use their money to finance a business endeavor whether they want to use my services or not.
I so agree with you! We need to get rid of public water
We don't have public water where I live. A private corporation manages our water supply and is regulated by the municipal government. The city does manage wastewater and sewage, however.
libraries
When you locate a corporate library that would be put out of business by socialization, let me know.
and fire departments
Ditto.
The founding fathers intended the government to take care of a very limited set of duties, such as bombing Iraq
Yes, national defense is on the short list of government duties.
not setting up wireless networks. Look in the Constitution - the word "wireless" does not appear ONCE.
Second, they've banned "sexy cheerleading". Yes, that right. They took time out of their legislative session to vote on a bill banning public high schools from cheers and outfits people might consider appropriate.
Considering that the public schools are funded by the property taxes of the people who live in the school district, if those people don't want cheerleaders wearing inappropriate outfits or performing inappropriate dances, I don't think it's unreasonable that the legislation disallow it. I think it's stupid and unnecessary, but this is pandemic in American culture. Anything that offends anybody for any reason, no matter how stupid and nit-picky the offended party is being, is immediately banned, disallowed, and apologized for.
In short, municipal wireless has a lot of potential to be bad for low-income families, and is anticompetetive. Slashbots hate corporate monopolies; why do they support government monopolies?
Because socialism is believed to be better for the "working man" than capitalism. I strongly disagree with this conclusion, but that's what a lot of people think.
I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap.
Take your own advice. Your post doesn't really refute the poster that you quoted. The person you quoted said that you can't fix social problems with technological solutions. Your examples all showed that if you remove technology, you create social problems. Those two things are not the same.
If semiconductors were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to support this statement? Because I can think of a number of massive power failures that crippled cities but there was hardly a collapse of government.
millions, if not billions of people would die within a year.
Again, this may or may not be true, but this has nothing to do with solving a social problem. All you're suggesting here is that we are dependent on technology to make our society function. Yanking that out from under our feet doesn't prove that we solve social problems with technology. How has technology solved the poverty problem? Hunger? Drug abuse? Teenage pregnancy? Gang activity? Racism? Homophobia? Alcoholism? Mental health issues? The breakdown of the nuclear family? How is any of this solved with technology? None of these problems are exactly new, either. Technology accelerates society but solves it's problems? Perhaps only to introduce new ones. The automobile improved public health by eliminating the need for horses and their biological byproducts from cities, only to create a whole new type of air quality problem. The sewer system supports your argument more. With sewage and wastewater treatment our cities and homes are far, far cleaner and more sanitized, and technology was the solution. On balance, though, I think technology more often replaces social problems with new types of problems. It's definitely progress, but I quibble with your assertion that we solve social problems with technology. Perhaps in wellness and safety.
Take the same number of people in New York, drop then in a forest the same size as New York, and watch how quickly society implodes upon itself without the technological infrastructure to support it.
This doesn't support your argument at all. All you've said is that if you take people who've learned the ropes of life in an urban setting and dump them into a completely foreign environment, they're unlikely to cope well. Well, duh. I can prove that technology causes social problems by picking up a tribe of bushmen and dropping them off in Santa Monica and observe that they are unable to function.
Clearly, technology is doing something.
Technology and society are so tightly tied together that you can't untangle one from the other without destroying something.
That's very true! But that doesn't refute the notion that social problems aren't fixed with technological solutions.
I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap.
Check your intellectual elitism at the door. Your post may have been insightful but you didn't really refute the person you are busily condescending towards here. He said, "You can't fix social problems with technolgical solutions." And I agree with you that this statement isn't true. Some social problems clearly can be addressed through technology, especially in medicine. However, you've failed to demonstrate that with even one relevent example. You've shown that society is dependent on technology, and nothing more.
Seriously. All I see here is fanboyism. Linux actually has security features like SELinux, execshield, strong privilege separation (how many Mac apps break if they can't write to their appfolder again?) and on and on. It walks the walk, whereas Apple only talk the talk.
The acting was fine in V and acceptable in VI. Coincidentally, Lucas didn't direct either film. The screenplay for V is the best of all the films by any reasonably standard. Written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett. Kasdan also did Indiana Jones with Lucas. Lucas didn't direct Jones either. In fact, every film George Lucas has ever directed has been a pile of festering crap. Two of his films, Howard the Duck and Ishtar, have become synonymous with bad films in pop culture. "This is the worst film since Howard the Duck!"
I think it's fair to say that Lucas struck gold once and then wisely let other people handle the aspect of filmmaking that he sucks at. Namely, directing and authoring. Lucas is a talented and imaginative story creator (plagiariser, depending on your perspective), but he cannot tell a story to save his life. Star Wars was a western in space, I'm tired of this "space opera" bullshit. It's a western. The good guys wear white. The bad guy wears black. The stormtroopers are only white so the audience wouldn't confuse them with Vader. They swing over chasms, escape from a room where the walls are closing in. I'm surprised Lucas didn't have Leia tied down over some railroad tracks while Tarken twirled his moustache.
And there's no question that the acting was superior in the original films. Compare Harrison Ford saying, "You're trembling" in V with Christianson saying it in III. Ford's acting carries emotional weight and significant. Christianson is reciting something he read in the script.
The rumbling under the surface about holding individuals financially responsible for damages caused by their compromised machines is disturbing. They have a point, though, in that user-level mitigation/prevention isn't always sufficient, and as virus writers become more clever, user-level activity may become increasingly insufficient.
It's also interested to see a return to data-destructive worms. I can't remember the last time I had to worry about a virus that would actually screw up my machine.
That reminds me, did anybody else ever get the millennium virus in the early 90's? Supposedly the virus would cause your hard drive to get wiped out or something on January 1, 2000.
I don't necessarily see why bashing someone is against the truth.
Criticism is not, by nature, mutually exclusive with truth. Nor is journalism mutually exclusive with providing criticism.
However, in the modern American media, deliberate obfuscation and masking of truth is being done to support the criticism that wouldn't stand on its own if people knew the truth.
It's not necessary that criticism eschew fact, it's just happening now because journalists no longer want to pursue truth (perhaps in the interest of proving their agenda), they want to push an agenda by manipulating or manufacturing truth.
We seem to have a lot of those nowadays, so I tend to bitch, and bash, a lot.
But are you making shit up about them to further your argument? Or blindly accepting things people say about them because it's convenient to believe that? If you're an intellectual critic, you're not doing that. There's a vacuum of intellectualism in American journalism today.
I think, having stated that I dislike religious conservatives telling me what to do, it's pretty plain I'm against Republicans and for Democrats.
I wouldn't even derive that much. I'd derive that you most likely oppose the religious right. I'm a conservative and I can't stand the Republicans any more. I've completely abandoned the party, it's being taken over by people who can't see the difference between, "This is right for me" and "This is right for everybody." It used to be the Democrats who did that (and a number of them still do), but the Republicans have become an insufferable lot of big-government, big-spending mouthpieces for religious conservatism. And I can't abide it. I see true conservatives abandoning the Republicans in droves. And I see true liberals abandoning the Democrats as well.
With that said, however, when Republicans do something right, that is logically sound, I'm not going to bash them. I'm not going to fabricate some lie just to knock them down, just because they're Republicans.
And that makes you politically honest. The media has no such integrity anymore. On either side.
The point is: bashing is not necessarily bad, if, by bashing, we mean "intense, negative criticism". It's a tool. Misuse of that tool, however - THAT is what's bad.
Again, I don't think criticism is bad or the media shouldn't do it. It's that their motivations for it are based on pushing an agenda and cherry-picking facts (or making them up) to support that agenda. The crime here is that this is then represented to people as objective truth. At least we know what platform Rush Limbaugh is preaching from. At least we know where John Stewart's political idealogy is. And we can digest and think about what they say knowing that their opinions are colored by their political beliefs.
But the media wants us to think that they are objective people reporting truth. They're not, and that's what's dangerous to a free and informed society. We allow all people to vote regardless of their qualifications to make an informed decision. The media is the only private industry whose role in the governance of a free society is specifically laid out in the constitution, and the media is not honoring their responsibility for a fairly informed populace (and neither, frankly, is the White House, Senate, or Congress, but that's not exactly a recent trend).
sn't a "news" source supposed to do the bashing? That's kind of their job./
I disagree. And this is why people are fleeing traditional news outlets. Where was a time when, when you asked people why they wanted to be journalists, they would recite a line about being interested in the truth. This isn't the case any more. Now they want to change the world and make a difference.
Investigative journalism used to be about fact-finding and ferreting out the truth from a web lies woven by powerful people. Now it's about furthering an agenda (both the Left and Right are guilty of this, so don't think I'm attacking you and your political offiliation).
The fact that you say here that it's the "job" of the news to bash stuff affirms this in my mind. I don't think the news is about criticism, it's about finding truth (yeah, we can wax philosophical here about the nature and unattainability of truth, just play along) and reporting it. Bias is inevitable, but recently our various media outlets have been found to be deliberately reporting lies or omiting specific truths to further an agenda. You've got the White House hiring reporters to write stories as though they were done by independent journalists. You've got the Department of Defense issuing carbon-copy letters for soldiers to "send home" to their newspapers praising the good work of Iraq. You've got NBC blowing up trucks, CBS issuing reports based on false documents, and dozens of reporters around the country being fired for just flat out manufacturing stories, quotes, and events.
These crimes of journalism are committed by people who want to change the world, not discover and report truth. Whenever somebody says they want to "change the world" or "improve the human condition", you can bet that it's codespeak for "recreate society based on my idea of what a sociey should be." And we have a word for such authoritarian views of what people should want and be: fascism.
Re-reading the post, I'm not even sure if the quoted individual was talking about Mozilla spreading FUD about Netscape or if they were mocking the spread of FUD...
We've got a link to two old Slashdot stories, the Inquirer's main page, and the Inquirer article to which this article is alluding. You people need to start including the actual articles that you're talking about so I can bitch at people for not RTFA when they post comments.
"I wonder why should companies contribute or fund the Mozilla Foundation, if any derivative work or redistribution of the Foundation's browsers they create is going to raise the FUD mocking and anger of Mozilla's 'lead engineer'."
Iomega's stock [yahoo.com] is still suffering from analysts obsessed with declining zip drive sales. Should be interesting if this has any impact, not that analysts ever read/.
Why would they? Slashdot is basically a collection of links to various web sites followed by vapid commentary that is propped up by an arbitrary moderation system. Why read Slashdot when you can just read the news sources to which Slashdot links? I enjoy commenting and reading other people's comments and debating stuff with you guys but I find no compelling reason why an economic analyst would read this web site.
Somebody will probably say that the perceptions of this community are valuable market research, but this is the same group that can't even admit that maybe piracy actually has a negative net impact on the various afflicted industries, on the grounds that we don't pirate anything, thus nobody else does either.
if NASA does not terminate the project [washingtonpost.com] to favor Bush's push to put humans on Mars, the Voyager 1 has enough power to last another 15 years (2020).
Will its power supply run out if funding is cut or something? How does that work?
I don't know enough about the industry to offer any suggestions. My opinion is that the money that IP holder SIGs like the RIAA are spending on legal fights, copy-protection schemes, and DRM technology is mostly going to waste. There is a fundamental problem with these efforts: they are trying to prevent digital copyright infringement. The problem is that the nature of the intellectual property they hold is mutually exclusive with preventing duplication. If a media can be played back, it can be recorded and duplicated. The only copy-protection scheme that will work is one which prevents the media from played back at all. And nobody is likely to buy a CD or DVD that cannot be played back.
The only barrier to digitization of the media is the energy barrier, and this barrier continuously shrinks. Bypassing copy protection, even if to exercise your rights under the Fair Use doctrine, has already been criminalized in US legal code by the DMCA. This, obviously, hasn't stopped anybody, so I'm puzzled by the rationale (on the part of the industry) that further legislation will prove any more effective.
I think the best answer is a massive paradigm shift in the distribution model, pricing system, and profit model of the industry. They also need to undergo a major intellectual shift away from presuming the criminal intent of their customers and towards respecting their consumer rights. This is risky business. It's naive to think that people will pay for anything if they don't have to. Despite the personal anecdotes that are recited ad nauseum on Slashdot about how everybody tries-and-deletes or tries-and-buys (and so do all of our friends), the industry as well as third party statisticians have conducted numerous studies and consumer polls that demonstrate rather convincingly that piracy does have a measurable, non-trivial, negative impact on the revenue steam of the industry.
The industry has been unsuccessful in stemming this tide, their future efforts are focused on hardware solutions combined with legislation (also doomed to fail), as well as threats of legal action, publicity campaigns that appeal to emotion, and probably other slippery slopes that I'm not aware of. None of these are likely to work either.
There's just no simple answer. Some of the member organizations of the RIAA are owned by (or themselves are owners of) hardware divisions that manufacture playback devices. Who wins? The publishing division and it's threatened revneue steam, or the hardware line, whose managers don't wish to be forced via US legislation to start producing crippled devices that people don't want.
The whole thing is a big mess, and it's one of the cases where they're trying to shut the barn door after the cows have all run out. It's too late. Their only choice is to embrace the new frontier and start figuring out, soon, how to profit within its rules.
Sounds like the "good people" are simply going to complain about being caught in the middle, and yell at those exercising "self-defense" instead of exercising social pressure on those "bad people".
We have a problem right now where the good people haven't yet reached the point where they'll acknowledge that the bad people even exist in any significant quantity. Just look at Slashdot, a community of mostly knowledgable people, who still can't figure out that the behavior of themselves and their pool of social contacts is not necessarily representative of the behavior of all of society. If it was, George Bush wouldn't be the President. We have to start with admitting that people do pirate and it's a problem. Once that's done, the social pressure you suggest could be applied. I doubt it'll be successful, however, because frankly, I think most of the downloaders really do just want free music and could give two shits about how legal it is as long as the chances of being caught are miniscule.
If you shoplift one CD, you'll be escorted out of the store an
Slashdot Mirror
The universal access fee isn't a case of the government taxing you and spending the money on starting up a business to compete with existing enterprises.
The Universal Access fee, I believe, is a tax that the FCC collects from long distance carriers who use local switches.
and the ~15 other taxes on telephone services that are plowed back into ILECs.
Such as?
Recall that UA was originally about capital investment in sparse areas.
I thought it had to do with affordable telecom access for low-income consumers, but it's two sides of the same coin, really.
That has more than been payed for and depreciated by now, and (I can't find a link for it now, unfortunately) but a report by the ILECs themselves showed that UA is pure profit now. And it has only been going up.
Having not seen the report, I'll take you at your word on this. So all of the UA buildout is done and the government continues to levy the AUF? And then people wonder why so many Americans oppose new taxes. They never go away. The government creates new revenue streams for itself with this kind of legislation, and you're more likely to separate Michael Moore from a Twinkie than the government from your money. These things never go away, even when they most clearly should. I share your ire.
Regardless, this is not a case of the government taxing the population and using the money to set up services that will compete with existing enterprises.
I believe the word you were looking for was imperialist [reference.com]. Neither definition fits well, frankly.
As for the filibuster, the filibuster is necessary to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Funny, I don't recall anybody characterizing the majority as tyrannical when it tried to enact the platform upon which it ran during the elections when that majority was the Democratic party.
Read the damn federalist papers sometime.
I have. It's on my list to re-read but right now it's stuck behind The Wealth of Nations, which can be a bear to get through.
Regardless, copy protection will not work. The only barrier is the energy barrier, and it constantly shrinks. Next?
Oh, wait.
I can't respond intelligently to your statement unless you clarify it. What government tax money are you referring to? Businesses receive tons of government money for a number of different reasons. Which are you referring to?
That's one of the ways that businesses get started in the first place.
My private business doesn't get to tax people and use their money to finance a business endeavor whether they want to use my services or not.
We don't have public water where I live. A private corporation manages our water supply and is regulated by the municipal government. The city does manage wastewater and sewage, however.
libraries
When you locate a corporate library that would be put out of business by socialization, let me know.
and fire departments
Ditto.
The founding fathers intended the government to take care of a very limited set of duties, such as bombing Iraq
Yes, national defense is on the short list of government duties.
not setting up wireless networks. Look in the Constitution - the word "wireless" does not appear ONCE.
Neither does "filibuster".
Considering that the public schools are funded by the property taxes of the people who live in the school district, if those people don't want cheerleaders wearing inappropriate outfits or performing inappropriate dances, I don't think it's unreasonable that the legislation disallow it. I think it's stupid and unnecessary, but this is pandemic in American culture. Anything that offends anybody for any reason, no matter how stupid and nit-picky the offended party is being, is immediately banned, disallowed, and apologized for.
Because socialism is believed to be better for the "working man" than capitalism. I strongly disagree with this conclusion, but that's what a lot of people think.
Funny? You turds! I'm serious, here, tell me you wouldn't use that service to check for every coworker and classmate you know!
Enter somebody's name, find all known nude photographs of that person. Needn't even be celebrities.
Take your own advice. Your post doesn't really refute the poster that you quoted. The person you quoted said that you can't fix social problems with technological solutions. Your examples all showed that if you remove technology, you create social problems. Those two things are not the same.
If semiconductors were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to support this statement? Because I can think of a number of massive power failures that crippled cities but there was hardly a collapse of government.
millions, if not billions of people would die within a year.
Again, this may or may not be true, but this has nothing to do with solving a social problem. All you're suggesting here is that we are dependent on technology to make our society function. Yanking that out from under our feet doesn't prove that we solve social problems with technology. How has technology solved the poverty problem? Hunger? Drug abuse? Teenage pregnancy? Gang activity? Racism? Homophobia? Alcoholism? Mental health issues? The breakdown of the nuclear family? How is any of this solved with technology? None of these problems are exactly new, either. Technology accelerates society but solves it's problems? Perhaps only to introduce new ones. The automobile improved public health by eliminating the need for horses and their biological byproducts from cities, only to create a whole new type of air quality problem. The sewer system supports your argument more. With sewage and wastewater treatment our cities and homes are far, far cleaner and more sanitized, and technology was the solution. On balance, though, I think technology more often replaces social problems with new types of problems. It's definitely progress, but I quibble with your assertion that we solve social problems with technology. Perhaps in wellness and safety.
Take the same number of people in New York, drop then in a forest the same size as New York, and watch how quickly society implodes upon itself without the technological infrastructure to support it.
This doesn't support your argument at all. All you've said is that if you take people who've learned the ropes of life in an urban setting and dump them into a completely foreign environment, they're unlikely to cope well. Well, duh. I can prove that technology causes social problems by picking up a tribe of bushmen and dropping them off in Santa Monica and observe that they are unable to function.
Clearly, technology is doing something. Technology and society are so tightly tied together that you can't untangle one from the other without destroying something.
That's very true! But that doesn't refute the notion that social problems aren't fixed with technological solutions.
I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap.
Check your intellectual elitism at the door. Your post may have been insightful but you didn't really refute the person you are busily condescending towards here. He said, "You can't fix social problems with technolgical solutions." And I agree with you that this statement isn't true. Some social problems clearly can be addressed through technology, especially in medicine. However, you've failed to demonstrate that with even one relevent example. You've shown that society is dependent on technology, and nothing more.
1. Recite tired Slashdot attempts at humor 2. ....
3. Profit!
OpenBSD is even MORE secure. IN YOUR FACE, LINUX!
I think it's fair to say that Lucas struck gold once and then wisely let other people handle the aspect of filmmaking that he sucks at. Namely, directing and authoring. Lucas is a talented and imaginative story creator (plagiariser, depending on your perspective), but he cannot tell a story to save his life. Star Wars was a western in space, I'm tired of this "space opera" bullshit. It's a western. The good guys wear white. The bad guy wears black. The stormtroopers are only white so the audience wouldn't confuse them with Vader. They swing over chasms, escape from a room where the walls are closing in. I'm surprised Lucas didn't have Leia tied down over some railroad tracks while Tarken twirled his moustache.
And there's no question that the acting was superior in the original films. Compare Harrison Ford saying, "You're trembling" in V with Christianson saying it in III. Ford's acting carries emotional weight and significant. Christianson is reciting something he read in the script.
It's also interested to see a return to data-destructive worms. I can't remember the last time I had to worry about a virus that would actually screw up my machine.
That reminds me, did anybody else ever get the millennium virus in the early 90's? Supposedly the virus would cause your hard drive to get wiped out or something on January 1, 2000.
Criticism is not, by nature, mutually exclusive with truth. Nor is journalism mutually exclusive with providing criticism.
However, in the modern American media, deliberate obfuscation and masking of truth is being done to support the criticism that wouldn't stand on its own if people knew the truth.
It's not necessary that criticism eschew fact, it's just happening now because journalists no longer want to pursue truth (perhaps in the interest of proving their agenda), they want to push an agenda by manipulating or manufacturing truth.
We seem to have a lot of those nowadays, so I tend to bitch, and bash, a lot.
But are you making shit up about them to further your argument? Or blindly accepting things people say about them because it's convenient to believe that? If you're an intellectual critic, you're not doing that. There's a vacuum of intellectualism in American journalism today.
I think, having stated that I dislike religious conservatives telling me what to do, it's pretty plain I'm against Republicans and for Democrats.
I wouldn't even derive that much. I'd derive that you most likely oppose the religious right. I'm a conservative and I can't stand the Republicans any more. I've completely abandoned the party, it's being taken over by people who can't see the difference between, "This is right for me" and "This is right for everybody." It used to be the Democrats who did that (and a number of them still do), but the Republicans have become an insufferable lot of big-government, big-spending mouthpieces for religious conservatism. And I can't abide it. I see true conservatives abandoning the Republicans in droves. And I see true liberals abandoning the Democrats as well.
With that said, however, when Republicans do something right, that is logically sound, I'm not going to bash them. I'm not going to fabricate some lie just to knock them down, just because they're Republicans.
And that makes you politically honest. The media has no such integrity anymore. On either side.
The point is: bashing is not necessarily bad, if, by bashing, we mean "intense, negative criticism". It's a tool. Misuse of that tool, however - THAT is what's bad.
Again, I don't think criticism is bad or the media shouldn't do it. It's that their motivations for it are based on pushing an agenda and cherry-picking facts (or making them up) to support that agenda. The crime here is that this is then represented to people as objective truth. At least we know what platform Rush Limbaugh is preaching from. At least we know where John Stewart's political idealogy is. And we can digest and think about what they say knowing that their opinions are colored by their political beliefs.
But the media wants us to think that they are objective people reporting truth. They're not, and that's what's dangerous to a free and informed society. We allow all people to vote regardless of their qualifications to make an informed decision. The media is the only private industry whose role in the governance of a free society is specifically laid out in the constitution, and the media is not honoring their responsibility for a fairly informed populace (and neither, frankly, is the White House, Senate, or Congress, but that's not exactly a recent trend).
I disagree. And this is why people are fleeing traditional news outlets. Where was a time when, when you asked people why they wanted to be journalists, they would recite a line about being interested in the truth. This isn't the case any more. Now they want to change the world and make a difference.
Investigative journalism used to be about fact-finding and ferreting out the truth from a web lies woven by powerful people. Now it's about furthering an agenda (both the Left and Right are guilty of this, so don't think I'm attacking you and your political offiliation).
The fact that you say here that it's the "job" of the news to bash stuff affirms this in my mind. I don't think the news is about criticism, it's about finding truth (yeah, we can wax philosophical here about the nature and unattainability of truth, just play along) and reporting it. Bias is inevitable, but recently our various media outlets have been found to be deliberately reporting lies or omiting specific truths to further an agenda. You've got the White House hiring reporters to write stories as though they were done by independent journalists. You've got the Department of Defense issuing carbon-copy letters for soldiers to "send home" to their newspapers praising the good work of Iraq. You've got NBC blowing up trucks, CBS issuing reports based on false documents, and dozens of reporters around the country being fired for just flat out manufacturing stories, quotes, and events.
These crimes of journalism are committed by people who want to change the world, not discover and report truth. Whenever somebody says they want to "change the world" or "improve the human condition", you can bet that it's codespeak for "recreate society based on my idea of what a sociey should be." And we have a word for such authoritarian views of what people should want and be: fascism.
Man!
i wish ppeps wud talk gud inglesh
We've got a link to two old Slashdot stories, the Inquirer's main page, and the Inquirer article to which this article is alluding. You people need to start including the actual articles that you're talking about so I can bitch at people for not RTFA when they post comments.
It's not FUD when it's true.
Why would they? Slashdot is basically a collection of links to various web sites followed by vapid commentary that is propped up by an arbitrary moderation system. Why read Slashdot when you can just read the news sources to which Slashdot links? I enjoy commenting and reading other people's comments and debating stuff with you guys but I find no compelling reason why an economic analyst would read this web site.
Somebody will probably say that the perceptions of this community are valuable market research, but this is the same group that can't even admit that maybe piracy actually has a negative net impact on the various afflicted industries, on the grounds that we don't pirate anything, thus nobody else does either.
This is bullshit. Some company that invested into this research is now going to profit off of it.
Will its power supply run out if funding is cut or something? How does that work?
I don't know enough about the industry to offer any suggestions. My opinion is that the money that IP holder SIGs like the RIAA are spending on legal fights, copy-protection schemes, and DRM technology is mostly going to waste. There is a fundamental problem with these efforts: they are trying to prevent digital copyright infringement. The problem is that the nature of the intellectual property they hold is mutually exclusive with preventing duplication. If a media can be played back, it can be recorded and duplicated. The only copy-protection scheme that will work is one which prevents the media from played back at all. And nobody is likely to buy a CD or DVD that cannot be played back.
The only barrier to digitization of the media is the energy barrier, and this barrier continuously shrinks. Bypassing copy protection, even if to exercise your rights under the Fair Use doctrine, has already been criminalized in US legal code by the DMCA. This, obviously, hasn't stopped anybody, so I'm puzzled by the rationale (on the part of the industry) that further legislation will prove any more effective.
I think the best answer is a massive paradigm shift in the distribution model, pricing system, and profit model of the industry. They also need to undergo a major intellectual shift away from presuming the criminal intent of their customers and towards respecting their consumer rights. This is risky business. It's naive to think that people will pay for anything if they don't have to. Despite the personal anecdotes that are recited ad nauseum on Slashdot about how everybody tries-and-deletes or tries-and-buys (and so do all of our friends), the industry as well as third party statisticians have conducted numerous studies and consumer polls that demonstrate rather convincingly that piracy does have a measurable, non-trivial, negative impact on the revenue steam of the industry.
The industry has been unsuccessful in stemming this tide, their future efforts are focused on hardware solutions combined with legislation (also doomed to fail), as well as threats of legal action, publicity campaigns that appeal to emotion, and probably other slippery slopes that I'm not aware of. None of these are likely to work either.
There's just no simple answer. Some of the member organizations of the RIAA are owned by (or themselves are owners of) hardware divisions that manufacture playback devices. Who wins? The publishing division and it's threatened revneue steam, or the hardware line, whose managers don't wish to be forced via US legislation to start producing crippled devices that people don't want.
The whole thing is a big mess, and it's one of the cases where they're trying to shut the barn door after the cows have all run out. It's too late. Their only choice is to embrace the new frontier and start figuring out, soon, how to profit within its rules.
Sounds like the "good people" are simply going to complain about being caught in the middle, and yell at those exercising "self-defense" instead of exercising social pressure on those "bad people".
We have a problem right now where the good people haven't yet reached the point where they'll acknowledge that the bad people even exist in any significant quantity. Just look at Slashdot, a community of mostly knowledgable people, who still can't figure out that the behavior of themselves and their pool of social contacts is not necessarily representative of the behavior of all of society. If it was, George Bush wouldn't be the President. We have to start with admitting that people do pirate and it's a problem. Once that's done, the social pressure you suggest could be applied. I doubt it'll be successful, however, because frankly, I think most of the downloaders really do just want free music and could give two shits about how legal it is as long as the chances of being caught are miniscule.
If you shoplift one CD, you'll be escorted out of the store an