In short, he's a very smart (arguably brilliant) legal mind who thinks that the current copyright system is the result of corrupt practices by media corporations and the complicit congress. He has unsuccessfully tried the legal route (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/technology/articles/eldredprimer_100902.htm) and is now working on the corruption aspect of the issue.
A "healthy human" can probably push out 300W for about 20 minutes before they collapse from exhaustion.
Not sure how they defined a healthy human, but ironman-class triathletes run at just over 300W for 4 hours during their bike ride. Not to say that I can power my XBOX360 just from my stationary bike, but human endurance feats are amazing. I fully plan on hooking up my stationary bike into my house... once I get a house. Which will take a while. At which point I might be too old and crotchety to do this. And at which point I might enlist my kids to do that for me.:D
ffdshow is an open source video codec. This sounds more like an issue with their uninstaller. I'm curious to see what the other "programs" are that people are complaining about.... I guess that's why I run Windows in a VM these days. Easy to roll back in case something goes wrong.
Re:This is slashdot, expect ignorant morons
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
"Not to mention that consensus != groupthink." The idea that slashdot discussions are dominated by objective and rational people who arrive at a consensus after careful thought is--literally--laughable.
Logic lesson:
consensus != groupthink and slashdot != groupthink are not identical, nor can you arrive at one by starting from the other. consensus != groupthink and slashdot == rationalthink (where presumably rationalthink == !groupthink) is similarly impossible to derive from each other.
You also seem to lack a sense of humor and ignored Microsoft's long-standing habit of handing things out for free to establish monopoly markets.
All in all, you're thoroughly making an ass of yourself. To summarize your initial post: 1) People disagree with you. 2) You proceed to insult people who disagree with you 3) You insult people by associating terms with them that by definition do not apply to them.
Your subsequent posts merely make unproven assumptions and unprovable leaps of logic. Not to mention that they display a sense of misunderstood superiority that is almost pitiful.
Re:This is slashdot, expect ignorant morons
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
I think your emphasis on the anonymity of the comment sort of reinforces the point that Slashdot membership--being one of the "community"--is elevated to some ridiculous therapeutic importance...
No, you completely missed the point. Being an AC makes it damn near impossible to be part of a community, as there is no history to be tracked, no Karma to be seen and no friending or foeing to be done. To accuse an AC to be part of groupthink is to detect it where the group part of the insult is missing completely.
To top it off, I dare you to actually do a full analysis of just one story. I doubt you have done anything other than remember all the comments you disagree with it. Come back to me when you have actual numbers to support your statement that there is a monolithic thought-clique. Not to mention that consensus != groupthink. Or do you also like to accuse scientists who subscribe to quantum mechanics of group think? Maybe you also consider biologists who subscribe to evolution as victims of group think?
Groupthink is a laughable accusation in any situation. To accuse an AC of groupthink just means that the accuser has issues with articulating proper arguments and finding himself with a minority opinion.
Re:This is slashdot, expect ignorant morons
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
Wow. I've never seen an AC commenter be accused of representing Slashdot group think. You sure you're not projecting your own insecurities here? Or are you too busy stating false dichotomies to notice that you're replying to an AC?
Err, I'll agree with the AC. This is why I called Sandman art sketch quality work. Three color palettes. A Baghdad Palace that looks like it took its inspiration from Halo's alien levels. Complete lack of background detail in the vast majority of panels. No sense of motion. In short, it has nothing of what I find important in graphic art.
I actually grew up in France, and was raised on French and Belgian comics. The comic magazines there were miles beyond what I saw when I finally picked up some copies of Marvel or DC comics. Yes, they had plenty of turds. But the breadth of topics covered by them is one of the main reasons why I have a significant collection of European comics, and 1 series of american comics. 90% of everything might be crud, but I venture to say that this increases to 99% in the case of american comics.
You're right, I haven't read any of Frank Miller's stuff from less than 10 years ago. I was referring primarily to his Dark Knight series, and that largely on the strength of the art. As for not liking the art of Sandman.... I think it's amateurish, too reliant on ink work and not enough detail for my taste. Yes, taste is in the eye of the beholder. But I was still disappointed to find out that what is considered in the US one of the best comics ever looks like sketch work and reads like run of the mill fantasy/surreal stuff.
... American Comics deserve every bit of ghettoization they have. The vast majority are of the superhero type, which are mindboggingly complex in their timelines, crossovers, retconning and super powers galore. Compare this with European comics (specifically Belgian and French), and you'll find everything from High Art to Low Art, super heros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, surreal, spy, WW2, funny, serious, story-driven, art-driven, and anything else you can think of.
As an example, after hearing so much about the Sandman chronicles, I browsed through one. I found the art disappointing, and the story mildly interesting. However, it was still miles beyond any of the DC and Marvel comic books next to it.
Yes, there are great examples of American comic artists - Frank Miller comes to mind. But they are the vast exception in a sea of mediocrity.
This is also why I think that videogames will escape ghettoization - they are a worldwide phenomenon, and this alone will prevent them from sliding into a state that is as narrowly focused as american comics. To some extent, I think they already have. I can think of a number of games that are more art than game - Psychonauts, for one. Okami, for another.
And this is exactly why I support open elections - the type that got Schwarzenegger elected. Have everyone run who can get a certain number of signatures going, and let everyone duke it out in the public forum. None of this nomination crap, which simply guarantees that only professional politicians who appeal to party activists get elected.
Interesting. I thought they opened up the PS3 because they saw that the Xbox360 could pose a serious threat to their market share. I didn't think that they'd open up one of their sacred cows to open storage formats. Then again, the point and shoot ones are still tied to Sony only products. I'll wait to see if this new acceptance of open formats spreads to other Sony lines/markets.
I doubt that online movies will clock in at 50GB. Right now, most people I know don't even know what Hi-Def actually looks like... my girlfriend is convinced that shows "Girls Next Door" are Hi-Def because her TV is able to do 480P. Nevermind what the signal is, nor what the compression is (and DirecTV compression can be ugly).
I expect movie downloads will be like mp3s: everybody knows that there is better quality out there, but only a few audio/video-philes really care. The massive convenience of not having to rip movies and being able to download them straight from any internet connection will outweigh the higher quality of a 50GB high-def copy.
Once FIOS becomes more widespread, services like Netflix on demand and iTunes video will explode. At least for as long as broadband access will stay unfettered.
Packing the PS3 with a blu-ray drive did pay off. It was probably the main reason that Blu-Ray won out - none of the other Blu-Ray players have had much chance in market penetration.
The only thing that bugs me about this development is that it's a Sony product and I don't like supporting Sony's attempts to lock their users into their products. Then again, I also believe that Sony will only have a few years of profiting from being the next-gen DVD standard - downloadable content should slowly take over within the next few years. There's the problem of net neutrality that could throw a wrench in that, but I'm still hoping that this will be resolved in favor of net neutrality.
Good point. I read about some of their deals, and I had a hard time wrapping my head around them. What do you mean, three people refinanced the Suez canal? This might indeed be the equivalent of me buying a lottery ticket, or pay a buddy 10 bucks to drink milk that's a month old.
And what if the artist is a commercial flop during his or her own lifetime, but hugely popular 100 years later?
I think this is the crux of your argument, and I will take a cold stance on this: if the artist cannot convince his surroundings that he is worthwhile supporting, then he doesn't deserve support. Yes, van Gogh died a miserable, pennyless death while his paintings now fetch top dollar. There is such a thing as being ahead of his time or just too crazy to get close to, and he was guilty of that.
The point I'm getting at is that it is by definition impossible to judge what someone else will consider worthy. Not unless you subscribe to the theory that everyone is wrong and you're right. If you allow for others to have different opinions on matters of preferences like art, you have to allow them the ability to deny support to an artist they do not approve of. Otherwise, you get exactly into the situation I described above with supporting mental masturbation - you will have to set the bar so low that everything will meet the requirement for support. After all, wasn't one of the center pieces of Dadaism the urinal in the museum? The reason it was supported was because it appealed to some people, not because it was the urinal was art.
Finally, there are plenty of people who like being challenged by art. Witness the Virgin Mary made of cow dung or the veal in formaldehyde - that artist was supported because he tapped into something that some people found worthwhile supporting. Nobody decided for those supporters, and no one should. Because really, what you're doing at that point is substituting your judgment for someone else's judgment. And that's just pointless - unless, again, you believe that your judgment is worth more than that of others.
In short - leave the decision of what art should be supported to the individuals. We cannot pretend to know what future generations would approve, nor can we pretend that art can be measured on an absolute scale. Therefore, we shouldn't.
I guess I'm more cynical than average. The only time I believe a case has been won is if the losing party agrees that they lost and stops pursuing any further claims.
I'd also love to find out what this new cash infusion is supposed to accomplish. Did Darl pull one last trick over a hapless investor? Or is there something else entirely going on? Because on the face of it, SCO is dead, even with an extra $100 million to blow through.
Regarding the mental masturbation, I'm neither against the mental or the masturbation aspect. However, if artists deserve an income simply because they produce something they call art, I want to get paid each time I think or each time I masturbate. I doubt that that will fly, yet a number of artists think that they deserve an income for what is essentially the same activity. If they do agree that there's more to art than mental masturbation, they also agree that they're subject to outside appraisal, and the easiest way to measure appraisal is to check how much people are willing to pay for it.
That said, you mention that art is worth more than a commodity. You're right, it is not a commodity. Two paintings are not alike in the same way that two barrels of light sweet crude are alike. However, if art is important to society, society will pay for it. It could be done the way the French pay for it: impose a tax on TV sets and funnel the money back into government supported art programs. Art programs that don't meet public appraisal get their funding cut. Or it could be done the American way: if you want art, you pay for it. And it's up to you to determine how much.
The point is still that someone pays for it while it's being delivered, and not 100 years down the road after the original artist is long dead.
Interesting perspective. I think this is why you see all the attempts at IP "education" by the various corporations and associations. They know that the only way they will get keep their ride is if society in general buys into it. Personally, I see that most of the people I know don't give a rats ass about copyright, and freely copy whatever they get their hands on. The only person I know who is in favor of damn near perpetual copyright happens to stand to profit from stuff her dad created about 20-30 years ago.
Someone give this guy props and mod him insightful. I won't comment too much, since there are plenty of comments already that point out the absurdity of this.
I'll just reiterate: there's nothing special about what an artist creates. An artist either fills a supply niche with material for which there is demand, or they're just doing intellectual masturbation. And yes, I'm dead serious with that statement.
This means that if an artist can't find a buyer, they don't deserve an income. Now, there's indeed the wrinkle of near-free unlimited distribution of digital copies of their work. Sell your song or painting to one person, and everyone in the world has access to the digital copy. Here are the options to deal with this: make sure that the first sale of the song compensates you for the work you put into it, or get enough people to pay for it to provide enough aggregate compensation. The simplest solution for this is still the tried and true live performance. You can't copy it, because then it wouldn't be live. You can easily calculate how much you need to charge to make a living.
That said, I can live with a certain amount of copyright law. This will make it easier for artists to create income and won't make the creation of art into a rat race of who can copy whose popular work the best. Personally, I'd like to see it be as long as a patent: 20 years. If 20 years is enough time to recoup investment in creating new technology, it is enough time to recoup investment in creating new art. Also, I don't think that copyright should end with the death of the artist. I'm sure there are enough people out there who aren't above killing someone to be able to freely copy and perform a piece of art. Not having the death provision in there will remove an incentive for killing. It's true that it's already illegal to kill someone, but it also doesn't mean we have to give killers a reason to kill.
Remember when everyone blamed the government for not doing more to prevent 9/11?
Only idiots complained that the government didn't do enough. There were significant failings, but none were due to lack of signal intelligence or lack of dragnet surveillance. This will not help with preventing 9/11 style bombings. Besides, there's more than a just a binary choice between installing random surveillance technique a and allowing unfettered access to targets to terrorists.
You're missing the point. No one is concerned that the spy satellites are used to conduct actual counter-terrorism and counter-espionage intelligence and surveillance. That's fine. The problem is that every little bit of technology in the last few years has been openly abused to conduct drag-net surveillance of innocent American Citizens.
I don't care if you're truly Intel, someone pretending to be, or just on crack. The point is that "Trust us, we know what we're doing" is not the proper response to "what the hell do you think you're doing?" Your stance that we cannot know what the Intelligence community is doing is just as irrelevant to the problem. The set of *possible* uses (as opposed to the set of actual uses) is very well known, and the problem is around the potential for abuse. Even a technology's potential for abuse is not necessarily a problem, if the users and wielders of the technology are known to abide by accepted laws and standards. The problem really is in the last few years, it has been shown that there are enough shitbags in the Intelligence community and those using its reports that these technologies are guaranteed to be abused.
I'll be damned if I consent to drag-net type intelligence gathering on citizens that are supposed to be presumed innocent.
ROFL. This is coming from the guy who until a few days ago was sitting at zero himself. BTW, how long until you're sitting at -1 and will have to create another handle? Current line seems to sit at 3 months.
Demonstating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country (Iraq) is a form of soft power that your ideology prevents you from seeing.
Wrong. That's hard power at its core. I will give you, however, that demonstrating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country can have a positive effect on other ill-behaved countries. But there's a major caveat here: the positive effect comes about if - and only if - the demonstration also shows the invader's ability to repeat said demonstration immediately, anywhere and against anybody.
The problem is that the other things that we demonstrated during the invasion of Iraq was that we're easy to bog down, that we are incapable of bringing peace and prosperity to the invaded nation at any sort of reasonable speed, and - most importantly - while we're busy in Iraq, we cannot do anything else.
This is just the hard power aspect of the invasion. The soft power aspect of the invasion simply demonstrated that we're willing to invade anybody under any pretext if the president feels like it.
I agree with your abstract statement that demonstrations of powers are important in international relations. I'd like to also point out that the Iraq invasion went contrary to all accepted military and diplomatic doctrine, and has so far yielded only negative results on all fronts. Not to mention that the current state of affairs was widely predicted by the people who knew what they were doing: the generals and diplomats who had actual experience in warfare and its consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Two quick URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig
http://lessig.org/blog/
In short, he's a very smart (arguably brilliant) legal mind who thinks that the current copyright system is the result of corrupt practices by media corporations and the complicit congress. He has unsuccessfully tried the legal route (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/technology/articles/eldredprimer_100902.htm) and is now working on the corruption aspect of the issue.
Not sure how they defined a healthy human, but ironman-class triathletes run at just over 300W for 4 hours during their bike ride. Not to say that I can power my XBOX360 just from my stationary bike, but human endurance feats are amazing. I fully plan on hooking up my stationary bike into my house... once I get a house. Which will take a while. At which point I might be too old and crotchety to do this. And at which point I might enlist my kids to do that for me.
ffdshow is an open source video codec. This sounds more like an issue with their uninstaller. I'm curious to see what the other "programs" are that people are complaining about.... I guess that's why I run Windows in a VM these days. Easy to roll back in case something goes wrong.
Logic lesson:
consensus != groupthink and slashdot != groupthink are not identical, nor can you arrive at one by starting from the other.
consensus != groupthink and slashdot == rationalthink (where presumably rationalthink == !groupthink) is similarly impossible to derive from each other.
You also seem to lack a sense of humor and ignored Microsoft's long-standing habit of handing things out for free to establish monopoly markets.
All in all, you're thoroughly making an ass of yourself. To summarize your initial post:
1) People disagree with you.
2) You proceed to insult people who disagree with you
3) You insult people by associating terms with them that by definition do not apply to them.
Your subsequent posts merely make unproven assumptions and unprovable leaps of logic. Not to mention that they display a sense of misunderstood superiority that is almost pitiful.
No, you completely missed the point. Being an AC makes it damn near impossible to be part of a community, as there is no history to be tracked, no Karma to be seen and no friending or foeing to be done. To accuse an AC to be part of groupthink is to detect it where the group part of the insult is missing completely.
To top it off, I dare you to actually do a full analysis of just one story. I doubt you have done anything other than remember all the comments you disagree with it. Come back to me when you have actual numbers to support your statement that there is a monolithic thought-clique. Not to mention that consensus != groupthink. Or do you also like to accuse scientists who subscribe to quantum mechanics of group think? Maybe you also consider biologists who subscribe to evolution as victims of group think?
Groupthink is a laughable accusation in any situation. To accuse an AC of groupthink just means that the accuser has issues with articulating proper arguments and finding himself with a minority opinion.
Wow. I've never seen an AC commenter be accused of representing Slashdot group think. You sure you're not projecting your own insecurities here? Or are you too busy stating false dichotomies to notice that you're replying to an AC?
The "insightful" mod IS the funny mod. Think of it as a metamod.
Err, I'll agree with the AC. This is why I called Sandman art sketch quality work. Three color palettes. A Baghdad Palace that looks like it took its inspiration from Halo's alien levels. Complete lack of background detail in the vast majority of panels. No sense of motion. In short, it has nothing of what I find important in graphic art.
I actually grew up in France, and was raised on French and Belgian comics. The comic magazines there were miles beyond what I saw when I finally picked up some copies of Marvel or DC comics. Yes, they had plenty of turds. But the breadth of topics covered by them is one of the main reasons why I have a significant collection of European comics, and 1 series of american comics. 90% of everything might be crud, but I venture to say that this increases to 99% in the case of american comics.
You're right, I haven't read any of Frank Miller's stuff from less than 10 years ago. I was referring primarily to his Dark Knight series, and that largely on the strength of the art. As for not liking the art of Sandman.... I think it's amateurish, too reliant on ink work and not enough detail for my taste. Yes, taste is in the eye of the beholder. But I was still disappointed to find out that what is considered in the US one of the best comics ever looks like sketch work and reads like run of the mill fantasy/surreal stuff.
... American Comics deserve every bit of ghettoization they have. The vast majority are of the superhero type, which are mindboggingly complex in their timelines, crossovers, retconning and super powers galore. Compare this with European comics (specifically Belgian and French), and you'll find everything from High Art to Low Art, super heros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, surreal, spy, WW2, funny, serious, story-driven, art-driven, and anything else you can think of.
As an example, after hearing so much about the Sandman chronicles, I browsed through one. I found the art disappointing, and the story mildly interesting. However, it was still miles beyond any of the DC and Marvel comic books next to it.
Yes, there are great examples of American comic artists - Frank Miller comes to mind. But they are the vast exception in a sea of mediocrity.
This is also why I think that videogames will escape ghettoization - they are a worldwide phenomenon, and this alone will prevent them from sliding into a state that is as narrowly focused as american comics. To some extent, I think they already have. I can think of a number of games that are more art than game - Psychonauts, for one. Okami, for another.
And this is exactly why I support open elections - the type that got Schwarzenegger elected. Have everyone run who can get a certain number of signatures going, and let everyone duke it out in the public forum. None of this nomination crap, which simply guarantees that only professional politicians who appeal to party activists get elected.
Interesting. I thought they opened up the PS3 because they saw that the Xbox360 could pose a serious threat to their market share. I didn't think that they'd open up one of their sacred cows to open storage formats. Then again, the point and shoot ones are still tied to Sony only products. I'll wait to see if this new acceptance of open formats spreads to other Sony lines/markets.
I doubt that online movies will clock in at 50GB. Right now, most people I know don't even know what Hi-Def actually looks like... my girlfriend is convinced that shows "Girls Next Door" are Hi-Def because her TV is able to do 480P. Nevermind what the signal is, nor what the compression is (and DirecTV compression can be ugly).
I expect movie downloads will be like mp3s: everybody knows that there is better quality out there, but only a few audio/video-philes really care. The massive convenience of not having to rip movies and being able to download them straight from any internet connection will outweigh the higher quality of a 50GB high-def copy.
Once FIOS becomes more widespread, services like Netflix on demand and iTunes video will explode. At least for as long as broadband access will stay unfettered.
Packing the PS3 with a blu-ray drive did pay off. It was probably the main reason that Blu-Ray won out - none of the other Blu-Ray players have had much chance in market penetration.
The only thing that bugs me about this development is that it's a Sony product and I don't like supporting Sony's attempts to lock their users into their products. Then again, I also believe that Sony will only have a few years of profiting from being the next-gen DVD standard - downloadable content should slowly take over within the next few years. There's the problem of net neutrality that could throw a wrench in that, but I'm still hoping that this will be resolved in favor of net neutrality.
Good point. I read about some of their deals, and I had a hard time wrapping my head around them. What do you mean, three people refinanced the Suez canal? This might indeed be the equivalent of me buying a lottery ticket, or pay a buddy 10 bucks to drink milk that's a month old.
I think this is the crux of your argument, and I will take a cold stance on this: if the artist cannot convince his surroundings that he is worthwhile supporting, then he doesn't deserve support. Yes, van Gogh died a miserable, pennyless death while his paintings now fetch top dollar. There is such a thing as being ahead of his time or just too crazy to get close to, and he was guilty of that.
The point I'm getting at is that it is by definition impossible to judge what someone else will consider worthy. Not unless you subscribe to the theory that everyone is wrong and you're right. If you allow for others to have different opinions on matters of preferences like art, you have to allow them the ability to deny support to an artist they do not approve of. Otherwise, you get exactly into the situation I described above with supporting mental masturbation - you will have to set the bar so low that everything will meet the requirement for support. After all, wasn't one of the center pieces of Dadaism the urinal in the museum? The reason it was supported was because it appealed to some people, not because it was the urinal was art.
Finally, there are plenty of people who like being challenged by art. Witness the Virgin Mary made of cow dung or the veal in formaldehyde - that artist was supported because he tapped into something that some people found worthwhile supporting. Nobody decided for those supporters, and no one should. Because really, what you're doing at that point is substituting your judgment for someone else's judgment. And that's just pointless - unless, again, you believe that your judgment is worth more than that of others.
In short - leave the decision of what art should be supported to the individuals. We cannot pretend to know what future generations would approve, nor can we pretend that art can be measured on an absolute scale. Therefore, we shouldn't.
I guess I'm more cynical than average. The only time I believe a case has been won is if the losing party agrees that they lost and stops pursuing any further claims.
I'd also love to find out what this new cash infusion is supposed to accomplish. Did Darl pull one last trick over a hapless investor? Or is there something else entirely going on? Because on the face of it, SCO is dead, even with an extra $100 million to blow through.
Ah, semantics. Fun. :)
Regarding the mental masturbation, I'm neither against the mental or the masturbation aspect. However, if artists deserve an income simply because they produce something they call art, I want to get paid each time I think or each time I masturbate. I doubt that that will fly, yet a number of artists think that they deserve an income for what is essentially the same activity. If they do agree that there's more to art than mental masturbation, they also agree that they're subject to outside appraisal, and the easiest way to measure appraisal is to check how much people are willing to pay for it.
That said, you mention that art is worth more than a commodity. You're right, it is not a commodity. Two paintings are not alike in the same way that two barrels of light sweet crude are alike. However, if art is important to society, society will pay for it. It could be done the way the French pay for it: impose a tax on TV sets and funnel the money back into government supported art programs. Art programs that don't meet public appraisal get their funding cut. Or it could be done the American way: if you want art, you pay for it. And it's up to you to determine how much.
The point is still that someone pays for it while it's being delivered, and not 100 years down the road after the original artist is long dead.
Interesting perspective. I think this is why you see all the attempts at IP "education" by the various corporations and associations. They know that the only way they will get keep their ride is if society in general buys into it. Personally, I see that most of the people I know don't give a rats ass about copyright, and freely copy whatever they get their hands on. The only person I know who is in favor of damn near perpetual copyright happens to stand to profit from stuff her dad created about 20-30 years ago.
Someone give this guy props and mod him insightful. I won't comment too much, since there are plenty of comments already that point out the absurdity of this.
I'll just reiterate: there's nothing special about what an artist creates. An artist either fills a supply niche with material for which there is demand, or they're just doing intellectual masturbation. And yes, I'm dead serious with that statement.
This means that if an artist can't find a buyer, they don't deserve an income. Now, there's indeed the wrinkle of near-free unlimited distribution of digital copies of their work. Sell your song or painting to one person, and everyone in the world has access to the digital copy. Here are the options to deal with this: make sure that the first sale of the song compensates you for the work you put into it, or get enough people to pay for it to provide enough aggregate compensation. The simplest solution for this is still the tried and true live performance. You can't copy it, because then it wouldn't be live. You can easily calculate how much you need to charge to make a living.
That said, I can live with a certain amount of copyright law. This will make it easier for artists to create income and won't make the creation of art into a rat race of who can copy whose popular work the best. Personally, I'd like to see it be as long as a patent: 20 years. If 20 years is enough time to recoup investment in creating new technology, it is enough time to recoup investment in creating new art. Also, I don't think that copyright should end with the death of the artist. I'm sure there are enough people out there who aren't above killing someone to be able to freely copy and perform a piece of art. Not having the death provision in there will remove an incentive for killing. It's true that it's already illegal to kill someone, but it also doesn't mean we have to give killers a reason to kill.
Only idiots complained that the government didn't do enough. There were significant failings, but none were due to lack of signal intelligence or lack of dragnet surveillance. This will not help with preventing 9/11 style bombings.
Besides, there's more than a just a binary choice between installing random surveillance technique a and allowing unfettered access to targets to terrorists.
You're missing the point. No one is concerned that the spy satellites are used to conduct actual counter-terrorism and counter-espionage intelligence and surveillance. That's fine. The problem is that every little bit of technology in the last few years has been openly abused to conduct drag-net surveillance of innocent American Citizens.
I don't care if you're truly Intel, someone pretending to be, or just on crack. The point is that "Trust us, we know what we're doing" is not the proper response to "what the hell do you think you're doing?" Your stance that we cannot know what the Intelligence community is doing is just as irrelevant to the problem. The set of *possible* uses (as opposed to the set of actual uses) is very well known, and the problem is around the potential for abuse. Even a technology's potential for abuse is not necessarily a problem, if the users and wielders of the technology are known to abide by accepted laws and standards. The problem really is in the last few years, it has been shown that there are enough shitbags in the Intelligence community and those using its reports that these technologies are guaranteed to be abused.
I'll be damned if I consent to drag-net type intelligence gathering on citizens that are supposed to be presumed innocent.
ROFL. This is coming from the guy who until a few days ago was sitting at zero himself. BTW, how long until you're sitting at -1 and will have to create another handle? Current line seems to sit at 3 months.
Wrong. That's hard power at its core. I will give you, however, that demonstrating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country can have a positive effect on other ill-behaved countries. But there's a major caveat here: the positive effect comes about if - and only if - the demonstration also shows the invader's ability to repeat said demonstration immediately, anywhere and against anybody.
The problem is that the other things that we demonstrated during the invasion of Iraq was that we're easy to bog down, that we are incapable of bringing peace and prosperity to the invaded nation at any sort of reasonable speed, and - most importantly - while we're busy in Iraq, we cannot do anything else.
This is just the hard power aspect of the invasion. The soft power aspect of the invasion simply demonstrated that we're willing to invade anybody under any pretext if the president feels like it.
I agree with your abstract statement that demonstrations of powers are important in international relations. I'd like to also point out that the Iraq invasion went contrary to all accepted military and diplomatic doctrine, and has so far yielded only negative results on all fronts. Not to mention that the current state of affairs was widely predicted by the people who knew what they were doing: the generals and diplomats who had actual experience in warfare and its consequences.