I think you're missing a few key details. Populism alone is not enough to bring about authoritarianism, otherwise the number of democratic countries would be decreasing, not increasing, over time. In many of the populist revolutions you mentioned, the most important catalyst was a broken economy that had put the majority of that country's population in poverty. Hitler may have been a great orator, but if post WWI Germany was economically sound and not the whipping boy of Europe, many would have dismissed him as the nationalist extremist that he was. What really drives populists revolutions is watching your friends and neighbors dying of hunger or exposure because they cannot afford to take care of themselves.
Anyway, quit making corporations be the great big boogeyman and take responsibility for your own damn life. Don't like what a business is offering? Don't go there. Sounds too simple, doesn't it? Essentially, that's as simple as it needs to be; all control businesses has over the lives of people is either because of government contracts or deals or the fact they mass action willingly has handed it over to them (and isn't that the most democratic thing of all?) through purchasing the services or what have you.
Uh huh. The great "voting with our dollars" bullshit. So tell me, now that the upper 1% are making several orders of magnitude more than the lower 20%, does that mean each of them gets orders of magnitude more votes? How democratic.
What you are describing is an Oligarchy where the rich effectively rule over the poor through their economic clout.
Whether we like it or not, CO2 reduction will eventually occur as a result of market forces (increasing fossil fuel costs). The ONLY question is whether we should start working on alternative energy sources sooner rather than later.
Measures like Kyoto are simply a way of artificially inflating the cost of fossil fuels in an attempt to spur development of alternative energy. They try to force the markets hand to work on solutions to inevitable problems a little sooner than they normally would.
I think he's complaining that Apple doesn't want anyone else to make syncing software for the iPod/iPhone.
But don't let that pull you out of the Jobs reality distortion field. iTunes has become a huge pig of an application although it still serves many segments of the market well enough. The problem is that Apple is trying to force iTunes on people who wouldn't use it voluntarily through their control of the hardware platform.
But even if he was, so what? Short of inciting violence, why shouldn't he be able to say that he hates orange people or that Pastafarians are evil? Good for Steyn for taking this and running with it. Who wants to live in a world where you're not allowed to explain why you dislike someone?
I concur. I may not like Steyn and think he's an asshole but I think Canada's hate speech legislation is both oppressive and ineffective. It restricts free speech while giving individuals who produce the hate speech a wider audience due to the controversy the law brings with it.
It's lossy because burning compressed music to CD does not magically make the quality improve to lossless WAV. Ripping it again to a lossy format then loses a bit more quality as the compressed music is re-compressed.
It's analogous to saving an image in JPG, taking a screenshot of the image (BMP), then saving as JPG again.
Defined by whom? That's not the definition at all. Terrorism is an attempt to destabilize cohesiveness of a society through violence and threats of violence.
But even ignoring that, saying that terrorism tries to "destabilize cohesiveness of a society" makes no sense. Destabilize why? To what end? Terrorist organizations like Al Queda have proven themselves to be relatively organized and patient in carrying out their plans (ie. 9/11). This suggests they have some ultimate purpose beyond merely causing chaos. Even organizations like the IRA that perform small attack at frequent intervals have an ultimate political goal.
Ignoring this fact is both appealing and dangerous. It's appealing because it allows us to paint them as the proverbial barbarian mob trying to tear down our precious society. It's dangerous because without understanding why they are attacking, we have no way of predicting what/who they may attack next.
Of course, we have a societal problem right now where we have been raised to think only certain actions are 'the norm' and thus things we do which are in fact harmless, or even geniunely helpful, can be viewed in the eyes of society as wrong.
Part of this is instinctive - a component of human nature. We like to place the world into arbitrary groups to simplify the dizzying array of what's out there. The problem with full disclosure is that human societies are not utopias and in times of trouble people tend to revert to their more primal instincts. Imagine Germany around 1940 as a full-disclosure society.
Wow clever. So when do we pass laws to enforce participation on those that don't give a damn now?
Any practical society must be designed with the majority in mind not the vocal minority. Communism would work too, if everyone did what's good for a communist society.
It seems like quite a problem to regulate this though. You have a piece of Free software that was originally written by someone who may either be an amateur or a professional. Then, over the years more people, who may also be either amateurs or professionals, add and modify bits to it.
In non-software engineering this happens as well. In Canada non-engineers can help to design a bridge/car/building but the final design has to be signed-off by a Professional Engineer. Effectively this holds the engineer responsible for the design, if he did not review it/verify it himself he is still responsible for whatever happens.
So while an LCD might set you back 200 for a good one...
A good one? I find that LCDs in this price range have terrible color reproduction and uniformity (you can see that the same color is different shades between the top and bottom of the monitor). Good LCDs are $600 - $1000 for 20" widescreen or 19" 4:3.
Its not just retail channels. Its MONEY. Producing an Album Costs MONEY. Lots of it. Record companies give the band access to studios and time with industry professionals who add polish and shine to the music.
How much would it cost for them to take it (polish & shine) back out?
What's really sad is that thinking back I've probably spent more time getting Windows to work than linux. The problem for linux is that few people actually install Windows on their machines, it comes pre-installed with all the correct drivers. When you have to install windows on a machine you built yourself though... what a hassle, especially when you're using RAID or SATA drives (with Windows XP at least). Then begins the re-installation of the 100 different apps, games, and patches that you had on your old machine, plus the configuration thereof (which is sometimes hard to transfer since a lot of it is in the ball of string known as the registry).
For someone who enjoys building their own hardware (for quality and reliability), linux is actually less time-consuming. Especially Ubuntu, which has worked out-of-the-box on the last three machines I've installed it on (including one laptop with wireless, typically a problem case).
The only purpose for chroot I've ever known is for testing, (ie. chroot into a dummy linux install and play with stuff) or to repair a broken linux install by booting from floppy/cd and chrooting into the mounted linux partition. I don't think I'd trust it for security and there are better solutions to making mistakes as root (such as frequent backups).
The amount of money that changed hands isn't really relevant. Just because GP lost some amount of money on the two transactions does not give him a moral right to use the music. When you sell a car, you retain no rights to use it, even though the difference between its new and used price is easily thousands of dollars.
Incidentally, used books can not be exploited like this easily since it would take a person a great deal of time to copy out the text of a book before selling it.
What happens when a company decides that it would rather not fund any artists, but just copy whatever is being funded and then sell that in a shinier package (since they save money on funding)?
I have to disagree. Owning property is one thing, but property rarely generates a continuous source of income for its owner, especially without any active participation. Unlimited (or extremely long) copyright allows for just that kind of a situation.
Obviously the author should retain the credit for his works, this would be akin to owning property, however the right to profit from the redistribution of said work should be limited by some mechanism.
When online vendors like amazon marketplace stop allowing resell, that is when I stop buying music all together.
Re-read your post and tell me honestly that you were ever buying music in the first place... ...unless you delete anything you ripped when you sell it, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing a few key details. Populism alone is not enough to bring about authoritarianism, otherwise the number of democratic countries would be decreasing, not increasing, over time. In many of the populist revolutions you mentioned, the most important catalyst was a broken economy that had put the majority of that country's population in poverty. Hitler may have been a great orator, but if post WWI Germany was economically sound and not the whipping boy of Europe, many would have dismissed him as the nationalist extremist that he was. What really drives populists revolutions is watching your friends and neighbors dying of hunger or exposure because they cannot afford to take care of themselves.
Anyway, quit making corporations be the great big boogeyman and take responsibility for your own damn life. Don't like what a business is offering? Don't go there. Sounds too simple, doesn't it? Essentially, that's as simple as it needs to be; all control businesses has over the lives of people is either because of government contracts or deals or the fact they mass action willingly has handed it over to them (and isn't that the most democratic thing of all?) through purchasing the services or what have you.
Uh huh. The great "voting with our dollars" bullshit. So tell me, now that the upper 1% are making several orders of magnitude more than the lower 20%, does that mean each of them gets orders of magnitude more votes? How democratic.
What you are describing is an Oligarchy where the rich effectively rule over the poor through their economic clout.
Whether we like it or not, CO2 reduction will eventually occur as a result of market forces (increasing fossil fuel costs). The ONLY question is whether we should start working on alternative energy sources sooner rather than later.
Measures like Kyoto are simply a way of artificially inflating the cost of fossil fuels in an attempt to spur development of alternative energy. They try to force the markets hand to work on solutions to inevitable problems a little sooner than they normally would.
I think he's complaining that Apple doesn't want anyone else to make syncing software for the iPod/iPhone.
But don't let that pull you out of the Jobs reality distortion field. iTunes has become a huge pig of an application although it still serves many segments of the market well enough. The problem is that Apple is trying to force iTunes on people who wouldn't use it voluntarily through their control of the hardware platform.
"Stuff that matters."
Disclaimer: I am Canadian.
It's lossy because burning compressed music to CD does not magically make the quality improve to lossless WAV. Ripping it again to a lossy format then loses a bit more quality as the compressed music is re-compressed.
It's analogous to saving an image in JPG, taking a screenshot of the image (BMP), then saving as JPG again.
Not to be an ass but you should get better speakers.
But even ignoring that, saying that terrorism tries to "destabilize cohesiveness of a society" makes no sense. Destabilize why? To what end? Terrorist organizations like Al Queda have proven themselves to be relatively organized and patient in carrying out their plans (ie. 9/11). This suggests they have some ultimate purpose beyond merely causing chaos. Even organizations like the IRA that perform small attack at frequent intervals have an ultimate political goal.
Ignoring this fact is both appealing and dangerous. It's appealing because it allows us to paint them as the proverbial barbarian mob trying to tear down our precious society. It's dangerous because without understanding why they are attacking, we have no way of predicting what/who they may attack next.
Wow clever. So when do we pass laws to enforce participation on those that don't give a damn now?
Any practical society must be designed with the majority in mind not the vocal minority. Communism would work too, if everyone did what's good for a communist society.
I believe that's 1/4 the paper since it takes 4 bits to represent a hex character. Also:
base 2 = base 2^1
base 16 = base 2^4
I believe the Ministry of Plenty is the IRS.
What's really sad is that thinking back I've probably spent more time getting Windows to work than linux. The problem for linux is that few people actually install Windows on their machines, it comes pre-installed with all the correct drivers. When you have to install windows on a machine you built yourself though... what a hassle, especially when you're using RAID or SATA drives (with Windows XP at least). Then begins the re-installation of the 100 different apps, games, and patches that you had on your old machine, plus the configuration thereof (which is sometimes hard to transfer since a lot of it is in the ball of string known as the registry).
For someone who enjoys building their own hardware (for quality and reliability), linux is actually less time-consuming. Especially Ubuntu, which has worked out-of-the-box on the last three machines I've installed it on (including one laptop with wireless, typically a problem case).
The only purpose for chroot I've ever known is for testing, (ie. chroot into a dummy linux install and play with stuff) or to repair a broken linux install by booting from floppy/cd and chrooting into the mounted linux partition. I don't think I'd trust it for security and there are better solutions to making mistakes as root (such as frequent backups).
The amount of money that changed hands isn't really relevant. Just because GP lost some amount of money on the two transactions does not give him a moral right to use the music. When you sell a car, you retain no rights to use it, even though the difference between its new and used price is easily thousands of dollars.
Incidentally, used books can not be exploited like this easily since it would take a person a great deal of time to copy out the text of a book before selling it.
What happens when a company decides that it would rather not fund any artists, but just copy whatever is being funded and then sell that in a shinier package (since they save money on funding)?
I have to disagree. Owning property is one thing, but property rarely generates a continuous source of income for its owner, especially without any active participation. Unlimited (or extremely long) copyright allows for just that kind of a situation.
Obviously the author should retain the credit for his works, this would be akin to owning property, however the right to profit from the redistribution of said work should be limited by some mechanism.
Other than any CD player that can play burned CDs. A very limiting format.
Re-read your post and tell me honestly that you were ever buying music in the first place...
...unless you delete anything you ripped when you sell it, that is.
copyright
Cars also kill "infinitely" more Americans every year than terrorists and WMDs, yet your country is still in Iraq for some reason.
The car comparison is flawed at best.